That Friend of His
by Steadfast-Bright-Star
Summary: WWI/1920s AU. In the spring of 1914, Mathias comes to work at Lille Skarstind, crumbling country house of the once-rich Bondevik family, and there he falls in love with Lukas, the young master of the house. But war is cruel. It will break their hearts and spirits, change Mathias from a boy into a man, and leave Lukas with a secret as hidden and shameful as Dorian Gray's portrait.
1. Chapter 1

_May 1914_

It was late in the evening when Mathias arrived at the house, the light thickening as the sun began to set and the shadows lying dark along the pathway and clustered among the trees. There was something oddly abandoned about the place. The fountains flanking the driveway spurted up in irregular jets, firing off to an unsettled rhythm like a pair of damaged hearts, and the topiary hedges were untended, overgrowing their patterns and blurring out their own shapes. He paused to light a cigarette and looked around the gardens with disapproval. He had heard of houses like this before – old, decaying houses, dying with their last owners. He had seen things in newspapers, advertisements selling off their contents piece by piece. This was a place where everything was running out – time, money and heirs. And yet here he was, with the letter offering him a job there scrunched up deep in his pocket, hoping to be taken on as an odd-job boy.

Mathias took an irritated sip of smoke and walked on. Such a position was beneath him, that much was certain. A few weeks short of eighteen, he had already spent four years in service at Asterley Hall, a vulgar faux-gothic mansion that gave off an overwhelming impression of rapidly-gained wealth and the status anxiety of the nouveau riche. He had been happy there, second footman and with the prospect of rising further in the servants' hierarchy in the future. Well. So much for all that. An ill-advised entanglement with a one of the gardeners had put a stop to his plans. Caught at it by the butler, his choice had been a rather stark one: leave without a reference, or leave with the police. Hence why he was here, rather lower down the ladder than he had begun, and with nothing to prove his four years of hard work. And all for a few stolen strawberries bruised and warm from being hidden inside his lover's shirt, and for a few kisses soft with juice and pungent with tobacco… He sighed, tossed his finished cigarette into a bush and straightened his tie. It was time to go back into service.

Mathias knocked on the back door and waited for a response, nervously tightening his grip on the handles of his suitcase and looking up at the shrouded windows. So this was Lille Skarstind, or 'the mountain house' as the locals in the village down the hill called it. He pictured the interior of the house as empty, dust thick on every surface and pale dowagers drifting from room to room. His knock echoed deeply through the corridors and then vanished into silence, a few moments passing until he heard sharp, precise footsteps approaching. Swallowing slightly, he smoothed his unruly hair and stood up a little straighter. The door swung open.

"Hello? Ah, you must be the new manservant." The speaker was a handsome man in his thirties, a little shorter than Mathias, with ash-blond hair and a rather severe set to his eyebrows.

Mathias nodded and mumbled, "Yes, sir."

The man gave a restrained smile. "Good, good – you seem to know the drill already," He shook his head. "You wouldn't believe how many servants go round to the front door on their first day," He looked Mathias up and down, as though he could sense that the truth was being kept from him. "You've not been in service before, have you? You didn't mention it in your letter."

"My aunt was a housemaid," Mathias lied. He lied easily and out of necessity. After all, he thought with a hint of bitterness, it wasn't as though he could disclose the circumstances of his dismissal. "But I used to be a labourer myself."

"Very well," the man replied. "I'm Arthur Kirkland – Mr Kirkland to you. I'm the butler here." He extended a hand and Mathias shook it.

"Mathias Køhler." he said, a little surprised. From the style of the letter, he'd expected Arthur to be older, a loyal servant clinging to the remnants of the family that had first employed him.

Arthur led him inside, giving him a cursory tour of the maze of kitchens downstairs. They were far too empty, the distant chattering of two or three female voices the only evidence of other servants. Most of the rooms were unused, the last ashes long ago scraped out of the grates, and half-open doors revealed dark, empty larders.

"Interesting surname you've got there, Køhler." Arthur commented after a while.

Mathias nodded absently, preoccupied by the state of the house. "My father was Danish." he explained.

"You'll be in good company, then," Arthur replied. "The Bondeviks here can trace their family back to Norway. They came over in the 1680s, I believe, in the court of Prince George of Denmark." Arthur's voice had taken on a rather bored tone, like that of a teacher teaching the same curriculum year on year. So they were one of _those _noble families, Mathias realised – one of those families who, in the absence of a future, glorified their past.

Eventually, they emerged from the kitchens into a narrow hallway which had a door at one end and a bare wooden staircase at the other.

"I'll leave you to get yourself settled in then," Arthur said, looking at his pocket watch with a slight frown. Quarter to eight, Mathias thought – high time the butler went to oversee the serving of dinner. He pointed upstairs. "Straight up to the attic and your room's the third on the right."

"Thank you." Mathias replied, turning to go.

Arthur called him back. "Just a little advice, lad," he said. "Make sure you're well rested tonight. You're replacing quite a few people, so you'll be working hard in the morning, and more so when the boys come back from school next month. Supper at half past nine."

With that, he disappeared through the door that separated the servants from their masters, and Mathias slowly began his ascent.

…

_June 1914_

The bedroom felt as if someone had died in it. There were clouds of cobwebs strung across the corners, the bed was stripped to its cold sheet and a weak sun gleamed through the window as sullenly as a scolded schoolchild. Mathias stood in the doorway for a moment, unwilling to cross the threshold. The air in the room seemed to have a different quality – thicker, perhaps, or heavier than the air outside, stale and unbreathed. The room was undisturbed, mirror-lake untouched, and it felt strange for Mathias to be stepping in and shattering the emptiness, sending ripples all through it. But step in he must, and did. It was necessary because life was finally returning to the house. After a month of creeping around the dust-filled corridors and trying to force open locked doors that were warped and swollen with water and heat, a month as lad-of-all-work and only once catching sight of the widowed Mrs Bondevik through a window as he pulled weeds in the garden, her sons were returning from boarding school.

Mathias reached up with a duster and pulled down the webs, the great mass of them like fishing nets or a bridal train. They clung to his fingers with their faint stickiness and he prised them off with a grimace. He undid the catch on the window to let a breeze into the stuffy room and his hands came away streaked with rust. He looked down at them with distaste. Within a week of his arrival, Mathias had had his initial suspicions confirmed – the Bondeviks were poor. This was not true poverty. It was not hunger or disease or going barefoot. It was poverty strictly in the relative sense – genteel poverty, but poverty nonetheless. It was the cracks in the best china, the walls denuded of their pictures, the paint on the window frames that flaked off at the slightest touch. It had crept in over the years like damp, and like all things that could not be repaired, it had been concealed. There was a sadness to Lille Skarstind, as though the house was aware of its own decline.

Nonetheless, Mathias felt a faint pricking of excitement in his stomach as he went about making the bed. He was looking forward to seeing the sons of the family, even though he knew his interactions with them would be minimal. Arthur was a stickler for that sort of propriety, even with the way things were, and he was far too proud a man to ever let on that they were all living in somewhat reduced circumstances. He would enforce the myriad rules of society until the house collapsed around them, Mathias knew that.

Having made the bed, Mathias turned his attention to the bookshelves, running his duster along the spines with a playful motion. He scanned the titles for something he recognised, something that would give away something of the young man who owned these books. His eyes flicked along shelves of algebra and geometry, a _Kennedy's Shorter Latin Primer_, all twelve books of the _Aeneid_ in the original Latin and a few things written in a strange script that Mathias half-recognised as Greek. A scholar, then, he thought. Studious, this boy, whoever he was. On the bottom shelf, the schoolbooks gave way to a few more personal things. There were a couple of Dickens novels, _Tennyson's Poetical Works_, _Paradise Lost_, a well-loved copy of _Our Island Story _and, tucked into the corner as though an embarrassing concession to sentiment, _A Child's Garden of Verses_. Attracted by the thought of a childhood that had never quite belonged to him, it was this book that Mathias plucked from the shelf. He felt its comfortable weight in his hands, opening it up to the first page and reading the inscription there, done in the immaculate copperplate of a society lady:

_To Lukas, on his birthday,_

_I can hardly believe that my little grandson is already five years old! Now that you are such a big, clever boy, I hope that you will enjoy reading this book and sharing it with your lillebror!_

_With much love,_

_Grandma_

Mathias blinked, shocked by the Norwegian word. Two hundred years the Bondevik family had been here. Two hundred years and as English as they came, yet they still hung on to the language, the odd scattered words like relics. Lillebror. Lille Skarstind. The name of a mighty mountain to grace the gentle slope of an English hill. He closed his eyes. It all reminded him unbearably of his father – his father, the Danish fisherman, raising his motherless son in a rough port of shipyards and shouting sailors and smoke and melting iron. He remembered his father's hands – a working man's hands, never soft but always gentle – and how they had guided him carefully down the narrow harbour steps to the boat. He remembered the fish glittering in the net and the scales that remained in the bottom of the boat, gleaming like silver sixpences, even long after the catch had been cleared out. His father had spoken Danish to him, a language so like the Norwegian that had so pierced him, but it was all lost to him now. It was the language of the place his father had left, the language of his nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and yet he could not summon a word of it.

His father was dead, carried off by some illness or another that had come over him the winter Mathias was five years old. He remembered the charity people who had come to take him to his new home, and he remembered himself, the distraught little boy, screaming at them in a confused mixture of English and Danish. Once he'd got to the orphanage, the other children had laughed at him, laughed at the thick, dark sounds and up-and-down rhythms of his language, and so he had let it shrivel away inside him. It wasn't as though he'd ever need it.

There was a knock at the open door and he turned sharply towards the sound, hastily shoving the book back onto the shelf. It was one of the maids, and Mathias quickly stood up, hoping that his distress didn't show on his face.

"Mr Kirkland says he wants you out front," she said breathlessly, cheeks pink from her rush to deliver the message. "The boys have just come."

"Suppose I'd best be off then," Mathias replied. He felt a spike of apprehensiveness shooting through him, and, with a last look back at the now-presentable room, went out to meet his employers.

…

Mathias knew, as it is sometimes possible to know, that he would remember this moment forever. He would remember those awful arrhythmic fountains and the weeds springing up through the gravel of the driveway. He would remember the lukewarm sun and the heavy humidity that was the price of warmth in England. And above all, he would remember the people he saw – Arthur, but he was familiar, and the strangers he was talking to. Two boys, two pale, beautiful boys. He knew that they were brothers, the Bondevik brothers – the heir and the spare, as such pairings were termed – but even if he had not known, he would have guessed. There was a vague resemblance between them, like each was a badly-altered painting of the other, and the older one – Lukas, he must be Lukas – had his hand on his brother's shoulder. They were dressed in school uniform – old enough now for long trousers, having outgrown the shorts and socks Mathias had worn until he left school at twelve – navy blazers and straw boaters with a black band around them.

Arthur saw him approach and called out to him.

"Køhler! You're to help bring the bags up," he informed him. He inclined his head to the two boys. "Mr Lukas, Køhler here will take yours. Master Emil, I shall take yours." Arthur bent and picked up Emil's bulging suitcase as though it weighed nothing, then stood waiting for Emil to follow him. The brothers looked at each other for a brief moment, then Lukas released his shoulder and let him follow Arthur inside.

Mathias looked up at Lukas and felt anything he might have wanted to say die in his throat. Lukas was perfect. His eyes were dark blue with a peculiar dullness to them; they were the colour of a starless night. His hair glimmered with the palest shade of gold, an achingly delicate colour. He was full-lipped, with cheekbones like buttresses, and in him Mathias saw a saint, an angel, a statue – a thing painted and gilded and made to be worshipped. He took a deep breath and was suddenly desperate for a cigarette – anything to calm him and make the warmth drain from his cheeks. Fixing his eyes on a distant point, he decided to take refuge in pleasantries.

"I trust you had a comfortable journey, sir." he said, picking up the suitcase. It was smart and shining, with _Lukas Bondevik, Lord Rochester's School for Boys _embossed on the lid.

Lukas nodded. "I did, thank you." he replied, in a quiet, deep voice.

Mathias took a step back, a gesture of submission. "And now, if you'll just lead the way, sir." he said, gesturing towards the front door.

"Of course." Lukas replied, and together they entered the cool of the house.

Once they reached the bedroom, Mathias was momentarily wrong-footed. Unpacking luggage was a job for maids, and he was unsure what Lukas was expecting him to do. He brought the suitcase into room, and then paused uncertainly.

"Would you like me to unpack this now, sir?" he asked Lukas, who had already pulled off his hat and blazer and thrown them onto his chair.

"Yes, if you would." he replied.

Mathias nodded and undid the clasps. He worked in silence, hanging the clothes back in the wardrobe. It felt strangely intimate to be touching them. He had never had dealings with clothing in his old job, but now he received a small, secret thrill from holding these things that had touched Lukas, though they were all washed and held no trace of him. He shook his head. The last thing he needed was to fall in love again.

The silence grew and he felt like he was intruding. Lukas seemed like a private person, and he sat on his bed as though there under sufferance, waiting with ill-disguised impatience for Mathias to leave. Folded inside the suitcase was a second school blazer, and as Mathias pulled it out, Lukas spoke to him.

"You can bring that to Emil when you've finished here," he said. "That and all my uniform."

"Have you finished school then?" Mathias asked. He was eager to continue the conversation, but the servant in him was horrified. Hand-me-downs? They really were poor, then, these Bondeviks.

Lukas nodded. "I shall be going up to Cambridge at the beginning of October."

"What will you be studying?" Mathias asked from the depths of the suitcase.

"Classics." Lukas replied shortly, as if it was a stupid question. And perhaps it was, Mathias thought. What else was there for a young man who never expected to work? What reason did he have to study anything else?

Mathias lifted the last things out of the suitcase – a pile of books – and stood up to leave. He would have loved to stay and talk for a while, but his work was done and there was no reason for him to stay any longer.

"Would you like the case put under the bed, sir?" he asked, slipping back into his customary role.

"If you would." Lukas replied absently, already reaching for one of the books. He had turned away from him, and he and Mathias were lost in their separate worlds once more.

…

"_You, Mr Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame…"_

Mathias silently spoke the familiar words as he read the passage once again, letting the writing fill him with its dull heat, a sort of abstracted desire for no one in particular. His bedside candle flamed up suddenly, then settled again, its thrusting shadow clear against the white wall of his room. _The Picture of Dorian Gray _was his favourite book, the only one he owned, bought on one of his Sunday afternoons off back when he was sixteen. He had been wondering about himself then, and about the way he was, and had come to hear of Oscar Wilde's novel about a beautiful young man, statuesque yet a moral wreck, and of the forbidden desire that supposedly permeated every page. He remembered the lengthy train journey all the way to the next town – he dared not go to the local shops for fear one of the maids might catch him there – and the frantic search through the shelves of the bookshop to find it. Most of all, he remembered the ride back to Asterley Hall through the darkening countryside, the book wrapped in brown paper and hidden inside his jacket, its sharp corners pressing into the flesh just below his ribcage and the delicious feeling of having taken his first step on the road to utter, glorious ruin.

From the back page, he removed one of his treasured postcards. You could buy them if you asked nicely, paid well and knew where to look, and Mathias had amassed a collection of six or so. This one showed a young man of about twenty leaning against a wall, bare-chested and smoking a cigarette. Mathias liked this one, and as he looked at it, he felt the familiar stirring heat of arousal rising in him, soothing in its strange way. He was frustrated, that was his problem. Always so frustrated, always so angry at something or other in the way that only young men can be. _Rose-red youth_, he thought, _rose-white boyhood_. He thought of a rose, the fleshy eroticism of its not-quite-open centre, and when he fell asleep his dreams were deep red, and hot, and when he woke, he was drenched in sweat and his own shame and thinking, desperately, of Lukas.

…

**Author's Note: Hey guys! Missed me? I've certainly missed writing, but many extrememly stressful months and 26 exams later, I'm back in the fanfiction game. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the chapter and that it wasn't too terrible – I certainly hope I haven't lost my touch! **


	2. Chapter 2

The summer wore on, the days lengthening until everyone, even the servants with their sixteen-hour shifts, slept and rose in the creamy light of dawn and dusk. The heat crept into everything, from the water that lay lukewarm and stagnant in the scalloped bowls of the fountains to the general feeling of listlessness that affected all the household and the lady of the house's request for cold salads rather than heavy meals of meat and roast vegetables. Mathias had bought a cheap translation of _The Iliad _down in the village for the sole purpose of impressing Lukas, and the sweat from his fingers would leave sooty smudges of ink on the thin paper as he turned pages in the stuffiness of his room during nights that refused to fall. He made slow progress. It wasn't half as good as _Dorian Gray. _He lived for the moments when the cook would send him out to the icehouse to collect this or that bit of meat or churn of butter and he would stand in the cool darkness, picking up shards of ice and letting them melt down his back or through his hair. In the evenings, he would fill the tin bath with his allotted five inches of cold water and squeeze the sponge out over his head, wincing at the pricking of the freezing droplets.

He was as happy as could be expected. He liked visiting the village and letting his servant's mask drop so that his local accent broadened and thickened and his speech became littered with bits of arcane dialect. There was a good crowd down at the pub, most nights, and he had enough saved up to have a couple of drinks. He had come back tipsy one evening, taking several minutes to open the gates and then giggling at the thought of how Arthur would react if he burst in through the front door and announced himself as the guest of honour. He had climbed the stairs carefully, stifling further giggles brought on by a particularly unflattering portrait of a Bondevik ancestor, and had passed by Lukas's room. Despite the hour, there had been a shaft of light seeping out from under the door, and the faint sound of the gramophone going, the melody – a woman's voice – rising thinly over the hiss of static on the recording. And, through some combination of the alcohol running through his body, and the unexpectedness of hearing someone sing as though it was a requiem for the setting sun, and the knowledge that Lukas was just a few feet away from him but so completely unreachable, Mathias had felt an unbearable sadness threatening to break out of him.

"Goodnight," he had whispered through the closed door, wishing that Lukas could somehow hear him. "You're beautiful. Goodnight."

…

The glasses of lemonade were incredibly tempting in the still, dead midday heat of the garden, freshly homemade with several generous spoonfuls of sugar in each one. Mathias was gasping for a drink. He would have to beg one of the lemonades off the cook later, if she was in a good mood and he promised to help the maids with the washing-up after dinner. But these were not for him, as the cook had reminded him with a maternal cuff around the back of the head – they were for Lukas and Emil.

He caught sight of the brothers straightaway, sprawled out under one of the spreading oak trees. Lukas, as usual, was reading; Emil, bored, was throwing a cricket ball up in the air and catching it, sighing every time he missed and it rolled away from him. Lukas looked up as Mathias approached and closed his book with an air of relief. Emil continued his game of catch, occasionally blowing an unruly strand of hair out of his face with an exasperated sound. Mathias covered the last bit of distance between them and set the tray of drinks down in front of Lukas, glad to finally be out of the sun. Cloudy shapes moved in front of his vision, seared onto his eyes by the brightness of the light, and he blinked to clear them.

"There you are, sir," he said with a smile directed at Lukas. "Freshly made this morning, so they were."

"Thank you, Køhler." Lukas replied in the neutral, accentless speech of the upper class, and Mathias felt embarrassingly rustic.

Mathias had seen Lukas many times since their first meeting, but their exchanges had never amounted to more than curt nods and a muttered 'good morning'. Now, he saw his chance to have a proper conversation, no matter what the rules of society dictated.

"Is that any good?" he asked, gesturing to the book that Lukas had so gladly discarded.

Lukas sighed. "Well, it's _The Iliad, _so I suppose it must be good, but I've read it so many times now that I've stopped taking it in.

Mathias beamed widely. "Funny you should say that, sir – I'm reading it myself."

Lukas looked momentarily taken aback, then recovered himself and returned his face to its usual imperturbable expression. He quoted something at Mathias, clearly expecting him to understand.

Mathias blushed, caught out. "I never learnt Latin, sir." he admitted ruefully.

Emil sniggered. Losing concentration, he dropped his ball and it rolled off down the slope. Lukas shot him a glare.

"Go and get that." he said sharply.

"But Lukas…" Emil whined, looking at Mathias as if to say _can't he do it_?

"Go on." Lukas ordered, dismissing him with a wave of his hand. Emil rolled his eyes and stood up reluctantly, scanning the undergrowth for any sign of the ball.

Lukas turned back to Mathias.

"I can't stand it when he's rude like that," he said apologetically. "I suppose it comes of being the youngest, though he's sixteen now."

"I don't mind it, sir." Mathias replied, a servant once more.

"However," Lukas said, the faintest ghost of a smile rising to his lips. "_The Iliad _was written in Greek. Easy mistake to make, on account of all those old authors borrowing from each other."

Mathias nodded as though that was the reason for his confusion. "I'm only reading it in translation, sir."

Lukas shrugged, considering. "Well, it's as good a place as any to start." he said.

They lapsed into silence. Lukas watched Emil searching in the bushes for the lost ball, then giving up and trudging back to his position under the tree. Mathias noticed that, for all his staying in the shade, Lukas had caught the sun on his cheeks, leaving little smudges of pink. They seemed unbearably delicate, like the wisps of colour on the face of a china doll, and Mathias felt like kissing them. Lukas had his sleeves rolled up, revealing his pale forearms, and Mathias wanted to kiss the insides of his beautiful wrists, to trace the faded-ink-blue veins right up to the crooks of his arms. He bit down on his lip and looked away. No one said anything over the whirring of crickets. Emil lit a cigarette. Lukas sipped his lemonade.

"I'll be back for the glasses in a little while, sir." Mathias said.

"Very well, Køhler." Lukas replied and Mathias, sensing that he was dismissed, turned and headed back into the heat of high summer.

…

The sheet threw up a flurry of dust as Mathias pulled it off the piano and let it slump to the floor like a discarded shroud. He lifted the lid and played a few experimental chords. It was horrendously out of tune – each note sounded flat and took a long time to die away, as though the strings attached to the keys needed tightening.

"We don't have time for that, Køhler!" Arthur reprimanded him. He pulled a tattered notepad out of his pocket. "Right," he muttered to himself, scribbling in it with a pencil stub. "Piano to be tuned, ten shillings most probably."

Mathias shut the lid again with a pout and looked around the dusty ballroom, trying to imagine the chandeliers lit up again, the cracks in the paintwork covered up again and himself doing what he had so often done at Asterley Hall – opening doors, serving the food, announcing the guests and generally being an attractive piece of furniture. Footmen were employed for their looks. Like most orphanage boys, he had been destined for an army career, but after growing five inches and beginning to shave in the space of three months when he was fourteen, it was decided that he would earn a much better living in one of the great houses.

He glanced over at Arthur, who had wandered off to inspect the damp stains blackening the gold scrollwork along the edge of the ceiling. He was frowning and making notes in his little book, probably singling out things to sell to fund all the work that needed to be done. And for a good reason. There was to be party at Lille Skarstind, the first event of its kind in several years. It was an important chance for the Bondevik family, as owners of the local Big House, to reposition themselves firmly at the centre of provincial society. But restoring one's social reputation did not come cheap, hence the need to sell things off. Mathias, on Arthur's orders, had already assembled a sizeable pile of objects to go to the auction house in the county town. They were broken things, mostly – tarnished candlesticks, portraits with their cracked and yellowed half-smiles, tea sets with missing saucers and chipped cups – but it saddened him nonetheless to see these relics of the family's prosperity hawked off like scrap metal. It reminded him of a frosty morning when he was five years old, all the furniture from his family cottage dragged out into the street and his box of toys carelessly upended, all the things his father had painstakingly carved for him spilled out into the street. He remembered a firm hand in his pulling him along and whispering promises – false promises – of the beautiful toys awaiting him in his new home. The neighbourhood children had come out to scavenge from the pile. He had looked back at them as the charity people led him away and they had met his gaze with the narrow-eyed, untrusting glare of street children. He remembered two boys getting into a tussle over a particularly fine model train, the victor running off with the prize clutched to his chest and the loser beginning to cry, the desolate wail of a hungry child rising over the smoky harbour.

"Køhler," Arthur said again, drawing Mathias out of his trance. "Make yourself useful, lad," He looked over at the corner of the room, as if expecting something to be there, then, when he saw that it was not, sighed with a harsh sound of irritation. "Right. Well. Thought I'd brought it," he said to himself. He turned to Mathias. "Go out to the shed and get that bucket of paint," He gestured to the walls with their paper stained and wrinkled like old sheets. "The blue, please. I want all this covered."

"Yes, sir." Mathias replied, already dreading the hours to be spent at the task.

"And mind you do it well," Arthur warned him. "If we're to find a bride for Master Lukas, we'll have to see that her family's impressed."

"Indeed, sir." Mathias replied weakly, turning to go. He had known all along, at least subconsciously, that looking for potential wives was the main reason for throwing the party. The Bondeviks were too poor to entertain. They certainly wouldn't do it without a clear motive. He knew it was pointless to be upset about something so inevitable, but nonetheless he felt a sort of miserable frustration rising in him. This was the way it always was; the way it had to be, for men like him. The only true invisibility was to be found in placing oneself above suspicion; in marrying, in conforming. He felt a sort of despairing anger rise in him as he realised that, no matter what he did, he could never change who he was – his outward appearance, yes, but never his nature; never the rhythm to which his sinful heart had so stubbornly chosen to beat.

…

_July 1914_

"I did hear about that, yes…"

"Oh yes, I was just as shocked as you are…"

"What a disgrace to her poor mother…"

"And then he said to me…"

Mathias moved through the crowd as unobtrusively as possible, snippets of conversation drifting down to him like offcuts from a dressmaker's table. With practised ease, he navigated the clusters of guests, his tray of champagne flutes at just the right height for them to take one as he passed by. This was what he was used to doing, dressed in his familiar old suit of tailcoat, waistcoat and black bow tie – black for servants, white for masters; a world of social information in a single twist of silk. He studied the partygoers with the faintly haughty eye of an experienced servant, able to judge someone's provenance from twenty paces. In contrast to Asterley Hall, where guests had turned up in motor cars and dresses fresh from the London Season, there was something slightly off-centre here. The clothes were outmoded by ever such a miniscule amount – a slightly dated cut to a suit, perhaps, or the hair up in a way popular two years ago, or scarves draped in such a way as to disguise fraying necklines – but Mathias noticed nonetheless, and he noticed that these guests were really not in the top flight of society. The family at Asterley Hall had hosted royalty; the Bondeviks were hosting traders, gentleman farmers, upwardly-mobile members of the middle class attracted by the chance to see the dying beast that was Lille Skarstind and to pick over its carcass like crows. They were the sort of people who saw the decline as the upper class as a victory, and celebrated it as though they had brought it about themselves.

He caught sight of Lukas and, as discreetly as possible, changed course so that he could approach and hopefully eavesdrop on whatever he was saying to the woman he was talking to – Mathias vaguely remembered Arthur telling him that she was the wife of a man who owned a textile factory in the next town.

"… That sounds very interesting," she was saying to him. "Classics does seem like a fascinating subject."

Lukas nodded, shyly looking down and fiddling with his cuffs. "I like all the reading," he said softly. "And the history too."

Mathias came closer, holding out his tray.

"Well, you'll have a wonderful time at Cambridge, I'm sure," she replied. "I visited once. The buildings are so beautiful there."

Lukas reached out to take a glass and as he did so, Mathias caught his eye. They held each other's gaze for a few seconds, a look that could have meant anything, and then Lukas broke it off with a half-smile, leaving Mathias to continue his tour around the ballroom and wonder if he had just experienced a moment of flirtation.

...

The chandelier in the dining room had been polished and dusted, its cracked glass pendants replaced with new ones, and it filled the room with a soft light that melted into the corners and smoothed out the less attractive things. It spared the conspicuously new paintjob and the gaps where paintings had been plucked out like teeth from being lit up for observation by cruelly bright electric light. Mathias, weighed down by a tray of soup bowls, cast an impatient glance behind him, gesturing for his fellow waiters to hurry up. They were village boys drafted in to add to the illusion of wealth, with no understanding of the rules of service. Many of them were wearing jackets that did not match their trousers, some had scuffed shoes and others appeared incapable of tying a bow tie. Arthur had given them all a stern rub-down with the clothes brush, but their coats were still specked with dust and fluff. They weren't proper servants at all, Mathias thought with a faint sense of self-satisfaction. He scanned the length of the table. Lukas, under extreme duress, had been seated between two likely-looking young women while Emil, young enough to be spared such things for the time being, was laughing with a boy about his own age and attracting occasional stern looks from his mother whenever he got too loud.

Mathias placed a bowl of soup in front of each guest as he moved along the table, serving them from their left, as he had been taught at Asterley Hall – another place and, it increasingly seemed, another life. Some murmured a 'thank you', others ignored him. He hardly minded either way. It was the job of a servant to deflect any insult with a serene smile and neutral comment, and he was good at it, even if he had sometimes had things said to him that had set his blood rising. He looked up quickly and saw that the other waiters seemed to be faring well enough, remembering how nervous he had been serving at his first dinner party.

Soon enough, he reached Lukas and his companions. Flustered by all the attention they were paying him, it seemed to Mathias that Lukas was content to let them steer the conversation in whatever direction they chose, occasionally nodding or offering a short answer to a direct question. Looking at him from behind, Mathias was overcome by his beauty, by the way that his sunrise-gold hair just brushed the top of his collar and revealed a tantalising glimpse of his pale neck. He was so delicate, his beautiful hands so elegant as they lay folded on the table. He so desperately wanted Lukas to turn around and smile at him again. He leaned forward to place the bowls on the table and nearly brushed against Lukas and it made his heart rise within him; he caught the heavy, sweet scent of the waxy pomade that all young men used to slick their hair and it he was undone. Oh, Lukas, he thought, my darling Lukas, let me take you away from here. We can go away somewhere – I don't know where, I'll find somewhere – and you can read all day if you want, and I'll learn Latin just for you, and Greek. Just leave all this behind, please. I'm telling you you're too good and too beautiful for all this. But he had done what was required and, despite the pain in his heart, it was time to move on, to finish his circuit of the table and then, when that was done, to begin to serve the wine.

…

_August 1914_

There was a strange feeling in the village. Mathias had detected it riding in on the servants' shared bicycle with a shopping list in his back pocket, and it had only increased as he had left the fields behind and entered the settlement proper. It was something ineffable, something he couldn't have begun to describe, but it lay draped across the silent houses and it sent a hollow shiver of unease through him. He began to hum a tune, then stopped as the silence seemed to intensify in response to the sound. When he reached the high street, he dismounted and wheeled the bike along it, excruciatingly aware of the crunching whine of the creaky frame against the cobblestones, and his own footsteps. He wished he had a cigarette with him – anything to break the tension and let him feign normality, to himself at least. The sense of foreboding in him tightened and tightened like a thread, and he knew that it must snap any moment – but how?

He found the shop and left the bike propped up outside, fairly safe in the knowledge that no one was likely to steal it. Once inside, he consulted the list. It was short – just a few items for the servants' dinner. The shopkeeper looked up as he entered and gave him a look that Mathias might have described as being full of pity. Unnerved by both that and the general atmosphere in the village, he decided to get everything finished as soon as possible, hastily rattling off everything on his list to the shopkeeper, "And four ounces of sherbet pips, please." This done, he stood idle for a few minutes while all his purchases were put together, and his eyes strayed to the headlines of the newspapers in the rack in front of him. All of them announced the same thing, written in the screaming block capitals reserved for national emergencies. Mathias swallowed and reflexively gripped the counter, nauseous with shock. The thoughts fled from his mind and left only a few facts there for him to confront: it was 4th August 1914, he was eighteen years old, and Britain had just declared war on Germany.

…

**Author's Note: Hey guys! Thanks to all of you who gave feedback on the last chapter, and I hope you enjoyed this one as well. Some M-rated stuff and angst in the next chapter, I promise!**


	3. Love and the Fear of Death

_October 1914_

"It was very good of you to come down and see us before you headed off to France, lad," said Arthur, sipping his tea. He gave a restrained smile. "I'm sure the maids liked seeing you in your uniform." he added.

Mathias shrugged. "Didn't have anyone else to visit." he replied. He lifted his own teacup and looked around the deserted kitchen. The candle on the table cast a glossy shine on the crockery arrayed on the shelves and the metal fittings on the cupboards gleamed and winked in the weak light. He would never have expected to miss the place, but weeks of army training had left him longing for exactly this – somewhere quiet and candlelit, comfortably domestic. His hand shook suddenly and the tea sloshed against the side of the cup. He wasn't ready to be a soldier. What was he thinking?

"It was very brave of you to enlist," Arthur continued. His face became thoughtful. "I may sign up myself, if it lasts," He sighed. "I'm not married, not too old… I suppose I could."

"Maybe we'll see each other." Mathias said, summoning up a wan smile.

"Hm, maybe," Arthur replied. "Although I doubt it'll last long. A few months, that's what they're all saying. A few months and we'll have you back here again, safe and sound."

Mathias made a non-committal sound. He hadn't thought at all about what he might do after the war. To do so would only be tempting fate.

Arthur looked at his watch. "You're getting the night train, aren't you? Down to London tonight, then Dover in the morning, was it?"

Mathias nodded. "Yes, that's it."

Arthur stood up. "Well then, lad," he said briskly, his usual businesslike demeanour returning. "Suppose you'd best be off then – it wouldn't do for you to be late for your boat."

Mathias stood too, slinging his army-issue bag onto his back, his empty water bottle rattling as he pulled the straps tighter. "I'll say my goodbyes then." he said, managing an echo of his old smile.

Arthur extended his hand and Mathias shook it. "We're all very proud of you here," he said sincerely. "You'll be a good soldier. You never gave me a moment's trouble when you were working here."

Mathias swallowed, touched by the compliments. "Thank you, sir." he replied.

"There's no need for all that formality," Arthur chided him gently. "You should be going now. And good luck, lad. Good luck."

…

The sun was setting as Mathias crossed the entrance hall, squares of light thrown across the floor through the twelve-paned windows. He paused for a moment to have a last view of the ceiling, webbed as it was with cracks and grimy with mildew. There had been paintings on it once. They had decayed, but beneath the hastily-applied whitewash it was possible to glimpse the ghost of patterning. Walking underneath it, he had often wondered what the lost pictures might have looked like. He sighed and shifted his bag higher on his back. He was leaving for the last time, and he was going to do so through the front door.

"Are they really sending you over there already?"

Mathias looked up and there – wonderfully, ethereally – was Lukas, standing at the curve of the staircase, one of his ever-present books in hand. He felt all his repressed dreams and desires rushing back to him at once after his time in the training camp, the forced communality, the puerile jokes and the constant telling people that no, he didn't have a girl waiting at home. For a moment, he was speechless, then managed to choke out:

"Yes, yes they are. I'm all trained now. No sense in waiting. They need every man they can get over there." He felt his cheeks warming up – oh God, please, don't let me be blushing, he thought frantically.

Lukas hurried down the last few steps and walked over to him. He smoothed his hair down with a quick, nervous motion and would not look Mathias in the eye.

"So you're going tomorrow?" he asked.

Mathias nodded. "London to Dover, then the boat to France."

"Where will you be, exactly?"

"I don't know." Mathias admitted. He had been told the name of the place, but had no idea where it was in relation to anything else. A memory flashed into his mind – the map in the orphanage schoolroom, the British Empire highlighted in pink. India, Ireland, Australia, the chalk dust swirling in the air and the ugly brown ink spluttering from the cheap school dip pens.

Lukas ran a distracted thumb over the spine of his book. "I'll be going up to Cambridge in three days," he said. "I hear a good few students have signed up as officers."

Mathias shrugged. "There's boys as have been killed already," he replied. "The army need replacements."

"Well," said Lukas. "I hear it'll be over by Christmas. A skirmish, the papers are saying. A few hundred dead on each side and they'll all realise how silly they've been and it'll all be over, one way or another.

They were silent for a few moments. Mathias was seized, suddenly, by a profound fear that he might be one of the 'few hundred', and wondered who would care if he was. And what if it was not a 'few hundred' but thousands upon thousands? He wished he had the confidence, or the self-delusion, of the men making such predictions in the newspapers.

"I'm scared," he told Lukas. "I might be killed. I could be dead in a week." His hands began to shake again. He imagined them clamped around a rifle. They had dismantled them at training camp, dissected them like cadavers and put them back together. Trigger, muzzle, breech… He knew the parts now, could name them as easily as a doctor named the parts of the body.

Lukas stood awkwardly, his free hand stuffed into his pocket. Uncomfortable with emotion, he seemed to be thinking of something to say. "I know." he eventually muttered – not surly, but with resignation.

Mathias looked at him and realised that it might be the last time they would ever see each other, that he might die without his feelings ever being made known. For a long moment, he agonised over what to do. He could ask, but he might well be refused. But what did he have to lose? If Lukas said no, if he was shocked or disgusted, then Mathias could simply run off through that door and never look back. And if not, well…

"Lukas." he said, using his name for the first time and finding that it rang beautifully.

Lukas looked up, his eyes full of something unreadable – apprehension, perhaps, or maybe hope.

"Lukas," Mathias said again. "Will you let me kiss you? Just once, just before I go?"

Lukas took a deep breath and bit down on his bottom lip. "Yes." he said simply.

And so Mathias pulled Lukas closer to him and kissed him with all the full force of all his months of longing – deeply, desperately, incautiously. He was beyond caring about what people thought now. Lukas let his book fall to the floor and it landed spine-first, flashing its white heart for a moment and then lying closed. They kissed with the reckless ardour of people who did not know if they would ever see each other again, and when they broke apart and Lukas stared up at him as if surprised at himself for having done something like that, Mathias took his face in his hands and kissed him again.

"I wish I didn't have to go." he murmured next to Lukas's ear, reaching for his hand and twining their fingers together.

"Do you have to leave tonight?" Lukas asked, and Mathias forgot all about his night train. He'd get the first one in the morning; he'd stay here until then.

"No." he said.

Lukas breathed in, a drawn-out sound with a hitch in it that set Mathias alight. "Do you want…" Lukas began hesitantly, then stopped and started again. "Do you want to come up? Upstairs, I mean. To my bedroom."

"I do. Yes. Yes, I will. Yes." Mathias babbled, overcome. His young man's blood leapt and flamed and he felt the heat rising in him. This was it. This was what he wanted.

…

The floor was littered with clothes – Mathias's uniform jacket, supposed to his pride and joy, was thrown carelessly with its sleeves pulled inside-out – and a half-packed suitcase lay there awaiting Lukas's departure. Lukas pulled the bed curtains around them and they were bathed in red light, the darkness of the shadows like the hidden parts of a flower. It was new to Mathias, an exciting novelty – the first time he had ever slept in a four-poster. It was not yet late, but Emil was back at school and Mrs Bondevik always went to bed early. They would not be discovered. And yet Mathias still felt like there was something missing. He could not have said what it was – perhaps, he thought, it wasn't really anything at all. But he felt its lack nonetheless, for some reason.

He was getting what he wanted, wasn't he? Yes, surely, the answer should be yes as he and Lukas moved together, kissing and crying out each other's names. And yet it was not what he had dreamed it might be. There was something wrong or, as he had thought, something missing. They were not attuned to one another. They did not move seamlessly; they jarred, they did not quite match. There was nothing to fix him, nothing to loosen the knot of anxiety in his stomach that hardened and tightened to disappointment as the time wore on. He wondered, maybe, if he had not wanted this sex at all. Sex – a sharp, unpleasant word, the narrow vowel shoved between the two angrily hissing consonants, a word that still had a touch of the clinical about it, the dispassionate. No, no, he thought helplessly. He kissed Lukas all over, because it was what one did, and what he had done before, with his gardener, but inside he was terrified. He had not wanted this… this _sex _at all. He was in love, damn it. He wanted love, and there was none. There could be none. They couldn't love each other. They didn't even _know _each other. There was nothing beautiful or loving to describe what they were doing as they forced it out of themselves and each other with gritted teeth and hands clasped around wrists. They were both lost. Nothing beautiful, no – no words. Buggery, sodomy, that awful sex word – those were not words of love.

There was nothing here but lust, as terrifyingly potent as birth or death, and as empty and unsatisfying as a night drinking alone. It was lust driven by fear of a changing world – fear of death, fear of the loss of a young life, fear of the war that showed no signs of abating. Mathias felt as if the world was mocking him, as if some god or another had taken his dream of Lukas and defiled it, so that instead of love and the sublimation of making love, he had nothing but this degradation, this feeling of cheapness and selling himself short. He felt tears boiling in his eyes and angrily blinked them away. It was normal to cry at moments like this, yes, but out of joy, not furious, betrayed disappointment. And he had been betrayed, in the way that all young men in love must be betrayed, and he felt his own foolishness keenly. He and Lukas said nothing to each other apart from the odd, jagged half-words that escaped in the heat of the moment. There were no words, no gestures of tenderness that would have done anything but amplify the miserable awkwardness that existed between them.

It was over soon enough, without any feeling of joy or satisfaction. The moment lingered for a split second, like the smoke left by the last firework in a display, then all was darkness and silence and Lukas blew the candle out. There was no 'goodnight', no 'that was wonderful', certainly no 'I love you'. No, the last thing Mathias wanted to hear about was love. He turned onto his side and closed his eyes, feeling the tears trickle out from under the lids. So this was it. This was what he'd waited all those months for, what he'd dreamed of. He lay crying in the darkness like a lost child, feeling ill-used and wishing more than anything that he had got his train. Too late now. He waited for sleep, and for the freedom from thought that it would bring him.

…

When morning came, the sky was thunderous and the colour of ash. Mathias and Lukas woke at around the same time, facing away from each other. They were shy in each other's presence, shocked by the things that they had been prepared to do and have done to them. Mathias stood up, feeling several different sorts of naked. There was the obvious one, which would have to be remedied by finding his uniform items in the chaos and then somehow flattening out the worst of the creases, but then there was the vulnerability. He felt like he was bleeding from somewhere, such was his emotional rawness. He felt excruciatingly new, as if he had been reborn, and everything felt keen and sharp this morning. He found his shirt and trousers and pulled them on, looking at a neutral point on the floor as he did so. He had a feeling that if he looked Lukas in the eye then something in him would be broken forever. He couldn't now, anyway, after all that had happened.

Lukas sat up, his hair tousled and sticky with unwashed pomade. Blearily, he glanced at the bedside clock.

"You're not late, are you?" he asked anxiously, watching Mathias's irritated search for his belt. "I haven't made you late, have I?" He chewed on a bit of loose skin on his top lip, apparently unwilling to move and let the bedcovers fall from him.

Mathias shook his head. "No, no, I'll get the morning train." he said, finding his belt and fastening it securely. He would, in all probability, be late, but if army training had taught him one thing, it was that nothing ever started on time. 'Hurry up and wait', that was the saying.

"You will write, won't you?" Lukas continued. "Promise me you'll write. I won't know where you are otherwise."

And I very much doubt you'll care, either, Mathias thought bitterly. Lukas would have others – countless others – chasing after him at Cambridge. Like all beautiful boys, he would attract attention wherever he went. "I will." he said eventually, lying, as he always did, with no compunction.

He picked up his jacket and felt a papery rectangle in his pocket. He knew exactly what it was. Flushed with the excitement of getting his uniform, he'd joined the queue of other young soldiers outside the local photographic studio and got his picture taken. It was the first time he'd ever been photographed. He'd been going to give the picture to Lukas, but now it wasn't so clear cut. He was angry with both of them, for being lustful boys and plunging straight into – no, not that word again – it, straight into that awful thing, without thinking about it. He didn't even want to be in the same room as Lukas anymore, the same house, the same country. But yes, he would leave him his picture. Just so Lukas always remembered which one of them had volunteered to fight for his country.

"I got my photograph taken," he said, his voice like a small boy's. "You can have it." He handed it to Lukas, who took it without looking at him or it. Of course you don't want to look at it, he thought. Give it a day or two and his picture would be down the back of the bookshelves, accidentally discarded and deliberately forgotten.

"Are you going now?" Lukas asked, seeing that Mathias was almost ready, just tying his bootlaces.

"Yes," Mathias replied bluntly. "I can't miss this train."

Lukas looked away, and Mathias saw a few tears blooming in his eyes. "Goodbye, then," he said. "And remember to write."

"Goodbye." Mathias said conclusively, opening the door. He looked at the room for a single second, then slipped at out and let the door blow shut behind him with a thud.

He walked through the silent hallways, listening out for the maids. He wanted to leave without being noticed. Running a hand over his chin, he decided that he would have to shave in the station toilets. The sooner he left Lille Skarstind forever, the better. He came to the staircase and looked down at the bowl of the entrance hall that, by some clever trick of the architecture, seemed to bulge and curve slightly like the stern of one of those old wooden ships. Lukas's dropped book was still lying there on the checked tiles, a forlorn thing, like a bird with a broken wing. He began to walk downstairs, wanting to be out of the house. When he came to the book, he picked it up and read the title on the spine. _Pride and Prejudice_, it said. Oh, for God's sake, he thought. When will you ever get tired of all that marriage talk? Marriage. That was what Lukas had to look forward too. Oh, and wouldn't he just pretend that Mathias had never existed when that happened?

Mathias pulled open the front door and made his defiant exit. He was glad to be gone. The grounds lay silent, apart from those terrible fountains still shooting up to that unpredictable rhythm, and his thoughts echoed louder in his head. Just a bit of rough trade – that was all he was to Lukas. The rich boys liked that, the thrill of being with someone working-class. It was, somehow, a greater transgression than all that hormone-saturated experimentation with other boys at boarding school, and he was sure that Lukas had tried some of that. They liked feeling deliciously sordid, as if the very touch of a working man could carry the heavy masculinity of mines and shipyards and army barracks.

You never said you loved him, the voice in his head told him.

Good, because I don't.

You could be dead in a week.

Then I won't waste any more time thinking about _him_.

He got both his trains, sitting there with his tears threatening to overspill every time the rickety old engine went over a bump in the track. Anyone looking at him would have seen him for what he was – a frightened boy, unable to admit that he was heartbroken, dressed up in a soldier's uniform but really far too young for all this business of love and death. He arrived at Dover, falling easily, gratefully back into the calculated thoughtlessness of life in the army, and by the time the soldiers spotted grey coast of France looming out of the leaden sea, he had managed to convince himself that Lukas had never cared about him at all.

…

**Author's Note: Well, that was pretty intense to write! Quick update is quick because I've had this bit of the story in my head for a long time – it's a bit of a turning point. That was my first M-rated scene (I'd say it was pretty obvious!) so I'm hoping you guys all enjoyed this chapter – the next one's going to be pretty angsty!**


	4. The Fields of France

**Author's Note: Hey guys! Sorry it's been a little while since the last update – I was busy writing a friend's birthday oneshot, and I lost my motivation for this a little bit because I wasn't sure if anyone was actually reading it. But yeah, I got my muse back and I'm quite proud of this chapter! This is about Mathias's war experiences, so if you're not comfortable with blood etc, please do tread carefully. Enjoy the chapter!**

_April 1915_

Christmas had come and gone, and the war was still not over. New countries seemed to be entering the fray all the time, dragged in by old alliances or leaping at the chance to exact revenge on a long-standing enemy. Mathias found it impossible to get an overarching sense of the conflict, which was rapidly becoming a world war, from his lowly vantage point in the trenches. Newspapers arrived there sporadically, always days old and crumpled, and he envied the journalists in their London offices, able to take a serenely political view of the war as they typed out orderly accounts of the continuing chaos and casualty lists to be pored over by anxious men looking for boys they went to school with, boys they played football with, boys who once fell to the ground screaming and pretending to be wounded in childhood games of soldiers. They fell forever now, fell in their terrifying multitudes. A single tap of a typewriter key and one dead man became ten, another and he was a hundred, a third tap and the man became a thousand. 'A few hundred' indeed, Mathias thought bitterly. And still they died. Married men died. Fathers died. Boys of sixteen died. Mathias had known one of them not even shaving yet, another who wrote to his father asking him to send the cricket scores. Both dead now. There was nothing here but death.

Mathias had read, or been told, that the great booming shells could be heard in Kent, and sometimes further inland. He wondered if they could be heard by the London journalists as they mapped in ink and blood the ebb and flow of the fighting. He wondered if they could be heard in Cambridge, their hollow thumps echoing through the quads and halls of the ancient university. He wondered if Lukas ever thought of him, and if he was ever first in the common room to lay claim to the newspaper with its daily messages of death. What might he feel as he read the casualty lists, scanning them for Mathias's foreign name among the Smiths and Johnsons and Millers? Maybe he wasn't even in Cambridge anymore. The universities were emptying, the students enlisting as officers or even just ordinary soldiers. Nonetheless, Lukas didn't strike him as the sort to want to fight. There was talk of introducing conscription. He'd probably hang on until then.

Mathias hated himself for thinking about Lukas. After all, he thought, it wasn't as though Lukas would be thinking about _him_. He'd got his bit of rough trade, and now he was probably with someone rich and stupid, someone who'd spoil him. But, fool as he was, Mathias couldn't stop torturing himself with thoughts of how different things could have been. In the moments between waking up and kit inspection, or the silence between attacks of shelling, or by the light of an illicit midnight match, he wrote letters – or, rather, began them. _Dear Lukas_, he would write, then decide it wasn't quite the right tone. He would write simply _Lukas _and then realise that it sounded too blunt, like a telegram. He tried _Darling _and _Sweetheart _and _My Love _and then crossed them all out, furious at his own sentimentality. Once, ludicrously, he began a letter with _Dear Mr Bondevik_, but the formality was so contrived as to be ridiculous. It was impossible to return to social conventions after all they had done. At any rate, all the worry about forms of address hardly mattered. He never got further than that. What was there to say? _We are dying here, helpless as flies stuck on paper, and I am waiting to die myself_. He finished his _Iliad _and gave it to another man, traded it for a packet of cigarettes. It wasn't half as good as _Dorian Gray_.

...

Sometimes, if they were lucky and it was quiet, the men were given leave to go into the nearby village a mile or so behind the lines. It was one of those quintessentially French places, the buildings all ochre-coloured with elaborate ironwork around the windows and the smell of fresh bread and pastries unspooling from the open doors of the boulangerie and patisserie. It was calm there, the inhabitants apparently determined to carry on with their lives as normally as possible, but Mathias saw their fear when the shellfire rang out in the distance – saw it in the tightening of hands round shopping baskets and the sudden silence of children stopping their nursery rhymes halfway through a verse. At any rate, it was rare for the soldiers to visit during the day. They came at night, mostly. None of them were particularly interested in the croissants and pains au chocolat in the windows of the patisserie, and nor did they stop to admire the small village square with the crocuses just beginning to bloom in the springtime air. No, they came for the cheap, acidic wine and the chance of some comfort from the village girls.

This particular evening was no different. Mathias had cultivated a small group of friends, men he liked well enough, and they would strike out together of an evening to go drinking. The bar was riotous, full to the rafters with English and French soldiers, shouting and smoking, holding up their empty jugs and demanding, with various degrees of fluency and success, that they be refilled immediately. Patriotism was not a valid currency, and the soldiers were charged as much as any customers – more, if they couldn't speak French. There was a small group of surly regulars, now forced into a distant corner of the bar, who stared resentfully at the soldiers and blew out irritated clouds of pipe smoke every few minutes, but they were always consciously ignored. Between the tables, wading through the crowds as though they were knee-deep in water, came the girls. A few were particularly popular, others less so, and there were some Mathias never saw more than once, although he hardly paid them any mind. His friends, like most of the soldiers, were half-mad for want of female company, and often made fools of themselves as they flirted and propositioned in French bad enough to be non-existent.

"Here miss, my friend... my friend... er... _mon ami_ here, he thinks you're very... very, er, _belle_? Is that the word? Pretty, I mean."

"I'll buy you a drink, how about that? Wine... _tu voudrais du vin_?"

The girls would smile indulgently, patiently going along with the soldiers' attempts at seduction, then turn to talk and laugh amongst themselves in their own language. Sometimes they gave the soldiers what they wanted, other times not. It always gave the men a good laugh when one of their number was turned down, but tonight Mathias found himself not particularly caring about the outcome. Besides, he had his own interests to pursue.

He stood outside, in one of the pools of amber light that filtered through the old leaded windows, trying to light his cigarette. In his mind lingered the image of a man he had seen killed the previous day, split open with a bayonet. His skin had been very white under its mask of mud, the red leaching out of his cheeks and lips as though all his blood was rushing to the site of the wound. He blinked and saw Lukas, beautiful Lukas, giving him that unreadable half-smile on the night of the party. The images stayed with him, the sacred and the profane. But which was which? The draughty orphanage chapel came back to him, the vicar's voice putting the fear of God into the children every Sunday. _Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood_. Surely the dead man had been cleansed of his sins through his sacrifice – that, or there was no justice in all of Heaven and Earth. But then again, what could be more disgusting, more unnatural, than death at the hands of another person? Mathias's hands were shaking again, and he gave up on his cigarette.

"_Vous avez froid_?" a voice asked him, a man stepping out of the shadows.

"English." Mathias replied. His tongue lay heavy and stupid in his mouth.

A relieved laugh. "Oh, thank God – so am I! Just thought I'd show my parents they didn't waste all those school fees after all." The stranger came up alongside him, distractedly fiddling with the cigarette he had in his mouth, taking it out and then replacing it. He jerked his head in the direction of the bar, from which muffled voices and the occasional shriek of female laughter could be heard. "Tired of the girls?"

Mathias instantly became more alert. These coded exchanges were what men such as him used to identify each other. He'd had a good few of them over the last few months – anything to get Lukas out of his head. "Never cared for them in the first place." he said.

The man smiled. "I'm the same myself."

Mathias nodded in acknowledgement. Every word here was loaded with meaning. "What did you ask me, anyway?"

"I asked if you were cold."

Mathias sighed deeply, sending out a frosty cloud into the sharp night air. Every part of him was numb, an aching fog of fatigue burning behind his eyes. "Yes, I suppose I am."

…

You couldn't always tell beforehand if you were going to get a talker or not. Mathias didn't much care for the talkers, the men who loitered after their assignations, wanting to pour their hearts out to a stranger. Mostly, the men you picked up or were picked up by would leave as soon as it was over, swearing and smoking as they stood up and stretched and raked their fingers through hair that was tousled and sweat-matted from their exertions. Others would be moved to unexpected tenderness once the charged heat had dissipated, wanting a kiss or some other chaste gesture of affection before they went out into the night again. There wasn't really a 'type' that you could say with certainty would turn out to be a talker, but they themselves were the worst sort. They craved more than the sex that was so easy to come by, and would sit on the bed, or in a chair, or lean against a wall if there was nowhere else, and then all the things they had never said would overspill in an awful rush of chaotic feelings. Mathias would listen, and sometimes reply, and wish that they would leave him to his misery.

"When do you think it'll all be over?" they would often ask, their stricken faces turned to him as if they expected him to know the answer. They would search him, probe him – "What are you going to do after? What did you do before?" He would tell them, without shame, that he had been a servant. It didn't matter anymore. There was something unifying in their suffering, the grim camaraderie and the blackest of black humour that they shared to make bearable the days where you saw a smooth-faced boy with his whole torso blasted open by a shell. Society was no longer important in this place without laws and points of reference. They were all rough trade here.

"Did you have anyone at home?" someone once asked him, a young man from Manchester who had already confided that he would wake confused in the night and search the empty horizon for the reassuring bulk of the factory chimneys.

"Yes," Mathias replied. "He didn't care for me. He just wanted a bit of rough trade – you know how these boarding school boys are. I doubt I'll ever see him again."

"I understand," the young man replied. "There was a nice lad I used to see sometimes, then my mother found out. I ran off to the army first chance I got, see, because she didn't want any queers dirtying up her house. That's what she said, at any rate."

"I never had a mother." Mathias said bluntly. They smoked together, then went their separate ways. He wasn't bad, that one, for a talker. It was only later, in the darkness of the trench and the silence of the sleeping men, that he felt a horrible stab of guilt for talking about Lukas like that. _He never loved you. He never loved you_, the voice in his head chanted over and over. Never, Mathias told himself, never. And yet that half-smile rose in his mind, and the tremor in Lukas's voice as he asked him to come upstairs, and the tears that had glimmered at the corners of his eyes as Mathias left.

Mathias shook his head to clear it. Just for show, all of it. Lukas had seen his chance with him and seized it. He was probably crying because it hurt, or because he was afraid his mother would find out. He probably hadn't given Mathias another moment's thought once he'd cleaned himself up and got all packed and ready for Cambridge. Besides, Lukas would never understand what he was feeling now. There was no way to explain the jarring shock of seeing a disembodied hand caught in the barbed wire as though to point the way for those who would follow, and nor was there any way to explain the horrible, surging sickness that had come over him as he had stepped in what seemed like a puddle but was in fact, a body in the first stages of putrefaction, and found that he was ankle-deep in the liquefying organs. There was no way to describe the scourging feeling as he had thrown up every last thing he had ever swallowed, no words for the dryness of his lips and throat after – and worst of all, the dryness of his eyes. There was no way to tell anyone, even his fellow soldiers, the revulsion he had felt after finding himself unable to shed a tear for the poor man. And how would Lukas, labouring through his books and crossing the quads wrapped up in his college scarf, understand the necessity of the mindless comfort the men all sought from the women or each other? What would he know of the underlying urgency to it, the need to feel the quickening in the blood, the hardening, the gathering of all their energy to this one purpose? It was only through this act, common to all animals, that they were able to feel human again, and capable of love, even if the love was empty and hollow and meted out to strangers. He cried then, his face buried in his hands, another sobbing man whose breakdown went unremarked in these days of madness.

"Lukas," he whispered through his tears. "Oh, Lukas, if only you could see what's become of me."

…

_June 1916_

The war was slowly advancing through France, the numbers of dead rising with every mad dash 'over the top' and every shell launched into No-Man's-Land. All around, the fields lay violated, stripped to their bare mud, and the only things that broke up the despairing vastness of the view were dead trees and the occasional abandoned farmhouse. No matter where you were, it was the same. But now there was talk of breaking out of the routine. News filtered down to the front lines of Important Decisions being made by the top brass, concerning the Big Push – an assault that would send the Germans scampering all the way back to where they'd come from. Few of the hardened soldiers like Mathias believed all the rhetoric so easily swallowed by the boys and conscripts, but it was impossible to shake off the feeling that things would, indeed, be different this time.

In advance of the expected battle, Mathias was given a few days' leave to return to England. After almost two years in France, he wasn't exactly sure what to do with it. Initially, he went to London to visit a friend who'd been invalided out after losing a leg. They sipped tea together and chatted about how things were. The friend had found a job balancing the books for a little tailor's in Wapping and was walking out with a nice girl who worked in the baker's across the road. Mathias told him about the planned Big Push, and they agreed that it was unlikely to be as important as the officers were claiming. After that, he went straight to King's Cross, eschewing all the sightseeing opportunities of the city, and, as though compelled by an invisible force, boarded a train for the place he knew so well. People always seek out what they know, he mused as the countryside flashed by, even if it's the worst thing for them and the last thing they need.

The bus to Lille Skarstind started off full, then gradually emptied. There were several other soldiers in the uniform of the local regiment – the one he himself had joined – who got off at the various scattered villages along the way, going home to relieved mothers and fathers and siblings, perhaps with a flower plucked from the roadside to give to their sweethearts. Mathias slipped into a sort of trance, thinking of the man he'd killed the month before. It had been hand-to-hand fighting – he had had no choice but to kill him – but the images still rose unbidden to his mind with the solidity of memory rather than the wateriness of imagination. He had stabbed him with his bayonet and felt it pierce... something, he didn't know what. It was a long time since the training camp and the sawdust dummies they had all mercilessly attacked until they could do it blindfolded. In, twist, out. In, twist, out.

"Are you alright there?"

Mathias blinked slowly, surfacing from his memories. The bus had stopped and the engine was silent. There were no other passengers and the driver had turned in his seat to address him. "What?" he asked, disorientated. His mind was still in turmoil.

"Are you getting off here, lad? This is the last stop." The driver spoke again, and something in the gentleness in his tone told him that this man was a father. Perhaps his own son was over in France. Perhaps he had already lost him.

Mathias stood up uncertainty, hauling his bag up from the floor. "Yes, I..." he swallowed and started again. "I wanted to get off here anyway." Still unsteady, he made his way to the doors at the front of the bus, and the driver looked at him with an expression of concern.

"You don't look too well," he said kindly, putting a hand on Mathias's shoulder. "You're as white as a sheet. Tell you what," he continued. "There's a lovely tearoom on the corner there. Get yourself something to eat, and the bus'll be setting off again in an hour, how about that?"

Mathias nodded. "Thank you." he mumbled, negotiating the narrow steps down to the ground again.

It was Sunday afternoon, and Mathias was worried he'd see the cook or one of the maids from Lille Skarstind enjoying her time off. He was beginning to realise that coming here had been a mistake. What was he planning to do? Go up to the house again? But he had had nowhere else to go. Asterley Hall was like a mirage to him now, and there was nowhere he could go that held even a moment's worth of happy memories. Better here than in France, he supposed.

At any rate, there probably wouldn't even be anyone at Lille Skarstind. Conscription had been in place for four months. Lukas, a student, would have been one of the first to go – he was barely twenty years old, and hardly in essential employment. Then Arthur, a little older but childless, unmarried and, again, not in essential employment. Emil, newly eighteen, would be going too, but it was Mathias's understanding that the young ones wouldn't be formally called up for a few months yet. His uniform conferred some benefits in the civilian environment of the teashop. He was served before people who had been waiting longer than him, and the waitress offered to bring him a newspaper.

It was a nice treat to sit with a cup of sugary tea and a cream bun, and Mathias found the tight knot of anger and fear, his constant battlefield companion, loosen in him a little. The waitress brought his paper and, almost reflexively, he found himself turning to the casualty list. Since conscription had come in, he had found himself searching for Lukas and Arthur every day. King, Kingsley, Kingsman... Mathias scanned the list. No Kirklands today. So Arthur was safe, for the time being. He took a bite of his bun and flicked his eyes back to the 'B's. Boling, Bolton, Bond, Bonner... No Bondeviks today either. All at once, Mathias felt a sickness rising in him. All these names that he had flicked through in his search for Lukas – all of them belonged to real people, men his age and younger boys. What right did he have to be cherry-picking from the list? What made Lukas, who had never concerned himself with Mathias anyway, any more worthy of his notices than the other names printed there? What made Lukas more important than, say, George Pilling, or Daniel Painter, or any of the names he could have pulled from the three narrow columns? He had killed men, several men. He had never known their names, and there was no guarantee that anyone else had either. A terror seized him, a conviction that, somewhere, the men whose blood he had sponged out of his uniform were lying unidentifiable in graves with numbers rather than names.

Not wanting to appear too frantic, he stood up and made his way to the small toilet at the back of the building. It was mercifully empty, and as he looked at himself in the mirror over the sink, he found it impossible to meet his own eyes. There was something dead in them, as though all the death he had seen and caused was collecting in them. And yet he himself had not yet sustained so much as a scratch. More memories flashed in his mind, obscuring his reflection. Shell-holes deep enough to drown in. Rats, slick with mud, slithering over him at night. A man with his entire lower jaw shot away, a friend trying to pour a few drops of water into his open throat and panicking because he simply couldn't angle the bottle correctly. Again, he felt the scourging sickness. The sugar from his bun coated his mouth, thick and cloying, and it all came rushing out of him again. The door opened and an older man stepped in. He caught sight of Mathias, still coughing and gasping, swilling his mouth out and splashing water on his face, then gave him a fleeting look, looked away again and left the room. So this was how it would be in the future, Mathias thought – praising the soldiers for their bravery and sacrifice, then choosing to look away from their suffering.

When the bus came, he rode it all the way back into town, then rented a room for a few days and waited to go back to the fighting.

...

_August 1916_

The promised battle had come, and come with a vengeance. Even here, several miles behind the lines and safely out of harm's way, the shells and shots continued to crack and boom with the continuousness of a pulse. Or not. A pulse was a fragile thing, as Mathias had learnt over the past few days. It was like a fraying thread, and the instant it snapped, there was nothing that could be done to repair it. Mathias shifted position slightly, moving more on to his back than his side to lessen the pain. Someone at the other end of the ward began to cry out, words lost in the screams. There was a sympathetic bolt of pain from his own wound, and he let his fingers trail gently over the stitches. He had been unbelievably lucky to survive, and as the throbbing began to subside, his mind drifted back over recent events.

It had taken him a few moments to realise he had been shot, as if he was a toddler just beginning to walk, unsure of why he had fallen. He had brushed it off as having simply tripped in the pitted ground, and it was not until he had begun to stand up that he had seen the blood beginning to seep out onto his uniform. He had looked at it in confusion, a numb sense of shock freezing his mind. Here was the blood, but where was the pain? He was certainly bleeding an awful lot. Reflexively, he had pressed his hands to the wound in his abdomen and watched in horror as the blood continued to spurt out through his fingers. There had been a taste of metal in his mouth, and when he had opened it, more blood had splashed out. At that moment, the pain had hit him, set him gasping and sent tears springing from his eyes.

The hospital was calm after the chaos of the casualty clearing station. He didn't remember much of the terrifying few hours he'd spent there, hovering between life and death, surrounded by screaming men. He might have cried out himself at some point, they thought. They had put someone else's blood into him, because he had had so little of his own left – a transfusion, the nurse had explained. They had taken him to be operated on, to have the bullet extracted and him stitched up, inside and out. "Pretend you're just having a tooth out." the surgeon had said to him, covering his mouth and nose with the chloroform mask. He was lucky, he knew that much. There weren't many men who survived a wound like his.

There was a nurse moving through the ward, stopping at each bed to give the man in it a small piece of card. Mathias sat up and watched in confusion. What was going on? Were they being sent home? He hoped not. The last thing he wanted to do was go to England – and, in his condition, a stormy journey across the Channel wasn't going to do him any favours. When the nurse reached his bed, she handed him one of the cards, and he scanned it anxiously. It was a notification of injury card. There was a space for a name, an address and a signature – the rest was pre-printed, except where you had to tick whether your wound was 'slight' or 'serious', whatever that meant. But who would he send it to? He imagined addressing it to Lukas and, in his mind's eye, saw him picking up and – what? How would Lukas react if he knew Mathias was injured? If he knew that he was the person he had chosen to tell? But Lukas would be in the army by now – maybe wounded, maybe dead. Mathias bit down on his bottom lip to steady it. It was high time he gave up on this silly infatuation. Lukas had never loved him, never would, and most probably didn't care tuppence either way for his welfare. With a sinking heart, Mathias handed the card back to the nurse and told her he had no one at home.


	5. A Reunion

**Author's Note: Hey guys! I know it's been forever and I'm really sorry – I've been on holiday for the last three weeks, so my computer time has been very limited, and both my inspiration and my confidence have taken a nosedive in the last few days, so it was hard to write through that. Anyway, I'm back, and I hope you enjoy the new chapter!**

…

_June 1920_

Mathias watched the water run through the crevices of his hands, watched how it welled up clear in them and then spilled out clouded by dust. He turned them over and let the stream run over the backs of them, carving out a path through the dirt. Blink and the water would become blood, thick and drying in the lines of his palms. Blink a second time and it would be pure again, flowing cleanly into the sink below. _Out damned spot_. He remembered the terror of being called upon to read in lessons, the _Complete Shakespeare _sitting ominously on the teacher's desk. Wash the blood out. Ah, if only he could. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the memories before they had a chance to appear.

A hammering at the bathroom door. "You nearly finished in there?"

Mathias jumped at the sudden sound, tensing as though it was rifle fire. He turned off the tap and straightened up, irritated by the interruption. "Give me a fucking minute!" he shouted through the door, drying his hands on the ragged towel hanging on a nail by the sink. He was angry all the time now. War had changed him. It had aged him in the thinning of his face, the dousing of his smiles, the way his spine tightened to military precision and then bent as though broken when it was all over. It had snatched the last of his boyhood from him; a cruel trick, a rug pulled from under his feet. After the violence, horrifically normal, it was easy – too easy – to find one's hand curling into a fist at the slightest provocation. For four years, he had been told to shoot first and ask questions later. Now that the war was over, he and all the other former soldiers were expected to drop the military act and return to normal life. As if it really was just a mask. As if it really was possible to forget all that they had seen and done, all they had known of the darkness in men's hearts. The unacknowledged urges still beat within them, and they had to tamp them down further and harder than ever before. Life went on, but it seemed increasingly as if no longer included them – as if society was tired of waiting for them to keep up.

Mathias pushed open the door and walked past the waiting man, ignoring his exaggerated sigh. He gritted his teeth against the urge to hit him in the face. Enough of this violence. Breathe. Just breathe, and think of something else, something better. Not of blood and screaming, and not of a house that stood on a hill. Not of music and champagne flutes, and not of dark blue eyes and a bed with red velvet curtains. The war was over. He was his own man now, and he would not think of Lille Skarstind. And yet it was only ten miles away, an easy trip on his new bicycle. Again and again, he was compelled to come here, the only place that held any sort of meaning for him. He was living in the county town now, in a boarding house for unmarried men. There weren't a great many of them, what with all that had happened. The pressure was on those who had survived to marry, to rescue a girl from spinsterhood. There weren't enough men to go around, and any man who hadn't yet got down to the all-important business of choosing a girl to make an honest woman out of and producing the next generation was viewed with disapproval.

The unmarried crowd were, by and large, damaged. There were the men who had been disfigured by their wounds, left unable to crack a smile, let alone talk or flirt. There were those destroyed by the poison gas, plagued by coughing and shaking, spilling their drinks and dropping their forks before they could take a mouthful of anything. There were those who, despite being superficially undamaged, lived in a tormented version of reality. They were the men who saw death in everything, whose minds were too weak or memories too strong to suppress what they had experienced – too far gone, too much given over to thoughts of what they had seen to pay any mind to the future, or even the present. And there was a fourth category – men too deeply warped to be changed by anything, whose lack of interest in women was embedded in their nature. The queers, the benders, the fairies. Himself. Lukas. Unless, of course, Lukas had simply sold out and married the first rich girl who came along. He'd have to, at some point. He was the wrong side of twenty-one, and admirers who'd spoil and cherish him would be thin on the ground by now. Unless, of course, he was dead. Mathias wondered if Lille Skarstind was still standing. Every week, another house went. You saw it in the newspapers – the heir dead at eighteen, the title extinct, the house crumbling. Hasten the end. Demolish it. Salt the earth like the soil of Carthage, so that the land would be forever barren. Good Classical reference there, Mathias thought. Wouldn't Lukas be proud?

…

_Strawberry pickers required for the summer months. 12 hours daily, paid by the pound. Accommodation provided. All enquiries and applications to be made to Hillbank Farm, outside Greyfleet._

_Vacancy available for a permanent hand on Lake Farm, £20 per annum, food and lodgings included. Apply in person – men accustomed to farm labour or other physical occupations preferred._

_Experienced welders needed at Johnson's Ironworks, adjacent to the Strandport shipyard. Wages dependent on level of experience. Applications close 15__th__ July._

Mathias scanned the noticeboard, hoping to find something more appetising than the hot, grimy darkness of the ironworks or the pain and boredom of spending twelve hours a day bent over in the fields. Each morning, the men in the boarding house clustered around the vacancies put up in the entrance hall, all looking for a job, the means to launch themselves out of the strange limbo in which they had found themselves. Mathias himself was a stonemason when he could find the work and a labourer when he couldn't. A labourer. His first lie to Arthur, the first time he'd whitewashed his past. Oh, to be back at Asterley Hall. He longed for the shapes of things – the scrolled edges of the silverware, the precise rectangle of the tablecloth, the pristine folds of his pocket handkerchief. Now he came home exhausted each evening, his hands coated with dirt and his clothes striped with the dust of his occupation. He was real rough trade now.

"See anything you fancy?" his friend Gilbert asked, himself absorbed in the scraps pinned to the board.

"Can't say I do." Mathias replied absently, continuing his search. He wanted to use his skills, gained during a hasty apprenticeship the previous year. The country had haemorrhaged skilled workers all through the war, and it was up to near-amateurs like him, with their rudimentary training, to fill the gap.

Gilbert had become a good friend since their meeting here just after the war, during those strange days that dripped out until the slow end of 1918. He was of Prussian extraction but kept that quiet. "I'm Gilbert Beilschmidt," he had said by way of introduction. "Only I'm not. Lance-Corporal Bell, at your service. Safer that way, don't you think?" As he had explained to Mathias one evening, the fact that he had been raised in England and fought in the British Army meant nothing to some people. The name change, though it grated on his forbidden Prussian patriotism, was vital for his safety. He often spoke fondly of his younger brother, Ludwig, who had been made a sergeant and earned a Military Cross for his achievements. "You see," Gilbert had said to him one evening while not entirely sober. "Gilbert – now that's a common enough name. Plenty of little Gilberts running around back when I was a lad. You shout 'Gilbert' in our street and three of us look up to ask what's the fuss. But Ludwig – now that's where it gets tricky. Lud can't be short for much else except Ludlow, and who's going to believe that? Then there's Louis, but that's a bit too French, you know – a bit soppy. But we got there eventually. So if you ever hear of a Lewis Bell, that's my brother."

Gilbert's voice jolted him out of his recollections. "Here, what about this?" he suggested, pointing to a small notice that was new that morning, judging by the fact that it had been pinned directly on top of several older announcements.

"What's it saying?" Mathias asked, his eyes skimming the advertisement for details of pay.

"Well, let's have a look now… Restoration job – tarting up some old place for sale, I'm guessing," Gilbert commented. "Furniture makers wanted, plasterers, gardeners – I could do some of that. Oh, and masons too. Got any experience with statues?"

Mathias's heart stopped, then raced. Restoration job. Old place. "Where, exactly?" he asked, a sudden thickness in his throat.

Gilbert's eyes flicked down the page to the address. "Lille Skarstind," he said with an air of disapproval. "Bloody ridiculous name, if you ask me."

"It's a mountain," said Mathias, his voice weak. "A mountain in Norway."

…

Mathias had not laid eyes on Lille Skarstind for almost six years, and as he and Gilbert neared the top of the hill, he was seized with an irrational fear of what was about to happen. Lukas would be there – Lukas, whom he hadn't seen since leaving the house, whose image in his mind had been almost obliterated, crowded out by darker, bloodier things. He lit a cigarette and sucked on it furiously, dragging every last bit of smoke out of it and trying to calm his shaking hands. He had seen men literally turned to vapour by the detonation of a mine. He had looked into the eyes of another man, then stabbed him with his bayonet. Sleepless one early morning, he had seen a firing squad marching on their way to carry out a death sentence. And yet, for all he fancied himself strong, all it took was the prospect of meeting Lukas again to make him lose his nerve. The smoke burnt his throat, and he coughed, sending a stab of pain through his old scar. Suddenly, absurdly, he wanted to laugh. You've killed more men than you know, he told himself, and yet you can't face meeting the one you once made cry.

Gilbert had noticed his agitation. "You alright there?" he asked, concern on his face.

The sun rising behind clouds. Sheets thrown back, his skin sticky with sweat. A train missed for the sake of dark blue eyes, a desperate kiss and a proposition he should never have accepted. "Yes," he replied, a thousand miles away. "Just a little tired."

He was unprepared for the sight of Lille Skarstind. Reaching the top of the hill, he and Gilbert stopped to catch their breath after the climb, and Mathias raised his eyes to look upon the house that had changed more than he could ever have imagined. Six years was a long time, but in his memory it was a single blur of blood and shouting, drinking and loveless sex and the great, abiding emptiness in him – the longing, the frustration. Six years was nothing. It was his whole life. It was a moment. It was forever. Here, now, in front of the house he had never thought to see again, it vanished, and Mathias felt as if he had never been away. And yet the house itself bore the marks to show that his absence had lasted not moments but years. The fountains, with their awful, shuddering, unpredictable rhythm, were silent. The water lay thick and stagnant in them, striped with weeds and moss. From the once-regimented beds and borders, trees and flowers overspilled, tangled up with thorns and nettles, and the topiary hedges had disappeared into their own rampant growth. The state of the house itself didn't bear thinking about, and Mathias felt a stab of unexpected sadness on seeing it. Windows gaped, showing the despairing darkness behind them. Tiles were missing from the roof, and the statues mounted on either side of the front door were meshed in ivy, their faces dissolving from years of rain and neglect. It was a near-ruin, close to uninhabitable and closer to demolition.

"Bloody hell," said Gilbert with a whistle. "That's a job and a half."

Mathias nodded absently, dazed by the sight in front of him. His eyes sought out his small attic room, where he had read his _Iliad _and revisited his favourite scenes from _Dorian Gray_. It was the place where he had looked at his treasured postcards and dreamed of Lukas, imagining the touch of those delicate hands, the taste of those beautiful lips, the sound of that soft voice crying out to him, forming his name, his praises. Mathias felt his face heat up at the memory. Even now, after his great disillusionment, the thought of his old hope could still send frissons through him. But that time was long gone, and six horrendous years separated him from the eighteen-year-old boy who had first knocked on the back door of Lille Skarstind. He looked on his younger self as if the two of them weren't the same person at all – as if he had not simply become a man, but become someone else entirely. In his mind's eye, the boy he had been turned his face to him, as helpless as a young conscript, and looked as him as if he was afraid of the man the war would make him. "It's certainly worse than some," he managed to reply at last. "Must have been the war. The owner's probably living in one room."

Gilbert shrugged. "Maybe so," He reached into his pocket, searching for a cigarette. "God," he said, casting his eyes over the front of the house. "I could probably afford this place myself."

…

Mathias laid his bag of tools on the ground, hearing the heavy clinking as they jolted around inside. Taking a step back, he began to inspect the statue, assessing what needed to be done. This one wasn't too bad – all it seemed to need was to have the roughness of time scraped away. He enjoyed jobs like this. Like a reassuring hand, he worked to smooth back the years from the carved faces and restore them to their former perfection. And yet, with every face he brought back from its decay, those awful, destroyed faces would rise in his mind, clamouring for his attention. He had seen men with missing lower jaws, men with a whole side of their face crumpled in on itself, burnt skin like dripped and cooled wax. They reminded him, horribly, of Dorian Gray's portrait, and he couldn't help but extend the metaphor and wonder, in his darkest moments, exactly whose sins they were suffering for. His own? But what had he done? It was a long list. He had killed several men, and left others to die. He had survived with only a single scar. He had survived, and for some men that was guilt enough. But what had he done before? He had left Lukas alone and crying. He had never sent a single promised letter. Gently, he touched the statue's pitted cheek, and, in the heat of the sun, it was warm with the warmth of human skin. Skin ripped from flesh and bones. Blood everywhere – a lake of it, an ocean. Repulsive. Repulsive.

Mathias ran a despairing hand through his hair. These emotional oscillations were too much for him to bear in his traumatised state. One moment he was smiling, sharing a beer with Gilbert and playfully betting his small change at cards, while the next he was crying into the sleepless dark and feeling the stickiness of blood on his hands, the hot spray of it on his face, a mist coating his lips and cheeks and eyelids. Then there was Lukas. Most of the time Mathias could do his best to hate him, even if he could never forget him, and convince himself that Lukas had taken advantage of him, and most of the time he could successfully reduce Lukas to an unpalatable memory, another faceless one-nighter who meant nothing more to him than any of the soldiers he had been with, nor anyone else he had had afterwards. But there were other times – his more vulnerable moments – when he would miss Lukas with every fibre of his being. _The very stones cry out_. He'd heard that somewhere – he wasn't sure where, but it had a biblical ring to it. From behind its mask of cracks, the carved smile of the statue taunted him. _The very stones cry out_. That was what he felt like, in the depths of his misery, when he found himself wishing like he had never wished before that he and Lukas had done things properly, and that the war had not interposed and forced them both into an impossible position – to consummate their budding relationship before either of them was ready, or to wait and risk never consummating it at all. Oh, you were so young, he thought to himself. So young – freshly shaved, dressed in a uniform stiff with its newness, and cleaner than he'd feel or be for another four years.

And now he was about to see Lukas again. He was tense, feeling as though things were being moved around behind the scenes in preparation for the inevitable encounter. It would happen, he knew that much. He could feel it, that deep conviction, that superstitious certainty. Now that the workers had all been detailed off by the foreman, Lukas would have to come out at some point and observe how things were going. He was dizzy with nerves. It was that old feeling he'd got waiting to go over the top, listening to the crack and thump of the bullets and shells and wondering if it would be him this time. Now he was similarly terrified. It was the not knowing that got to him – the impossibility of guessing or hoping what was going to happen. God, he didn't even know what he wanted to happen. A hundred permutations of the situation, a thousand, flickered through his tortured mind. What would Lukas say? Anything? Would he just retreat into that weighted silence of his and pretend not to know or remember him? Mathias felt his stomach twisting, a deep and unpleasant motion that sent its coils all through his body. This lust, this infatuation, would be the death of him. It was all his own fault, really for getting above himself. Poor as he was, Lukas was still cut from a rather different cloth from Mathias, and the mixing of upstairs and downstairs could never do anyone any good. Oh, but how could he have resisted? The night came back to him – the setting sun through the windows of the hall, and Lukas on the turn of the stairs, and that hitch in his voice that, for Mathias, had not only removed his doubts but made him forget entirely the possibility of refusing. His thoughts swirled and darted, confused, and he could not hold on to any of them for long enough. He had made a terrible mistake. He had been wrong to want or hope for more than what he'd got with his soldiers. Love. What good had that ever done him? What evidence had he seen of it in the trenches? If only he had written. If only he had, somehow, been able to rationalise his disordered emotions into words on the page. He closed his eyes, trying to calm the fury in his mind. He felt like he was waiting for his execution. And then…

"I thought you were dead."

Mathias turned, electrified by the shock of the sound of Lukas's voice, a voice from his past that he had so often heard whispering in his heart in the silence between shots. He saw Lukas standing there, saw him step back in shock. He ran his eyes over him, remembering the precise sweep and fall of his hair, the eyes that glinted from out of their own darkness, the pale skin beginning to redden from the surprise of seeing him. The sight of him hit Mathias like a physical force, the jolt of recognising someone after a long absence. The Lukas he remembered was an eighteen-year-old boy, but the man who stood before him had changed since then. He had lost the boyish softness to his features and skin and, however belatedly, had grown his last inch or two. There was a difference to the way he carried himself too – he stood straight out of defiance rather than natural confidence, as if he had suffered a blow at some point, and there was a sort of restrained sadness in him as he looked at Mathias from a tactful distance. All at once, the memory – the abstraction – of Lukas, flowed away into the blackness of the war and the past, and before him Mathias saw the reality. And despite how stupidly self-evident and hopelessly inarticulate it was, all he was able to say was, "I'm not dead."

Lukas made a sound like a sort of despairing laugh, facing this unbelievable yet undeniable truth. "How was I supposed to know that," he asked. "When you never wrote to me?"

"I couldn't." Mathias replied, strangely ashamed. He should be taking the defensive, he thought, and instead he was crumbling.

Lukas sighed, exasperated. "A word!" he said in a voice tight with frustration. "A word, Mathias. A word and an address – that's all you would have had to send. That's all I would have needed, so I'd know where you were."

"What did you want me to say?" Mathias protested. "You know how it was over there. You must know, if you went."

Lukas blinked, and for a moment his face was vulnerable. "Of course I went," he said hastily. "Of course I saw. It was impossible not to go," He shook his head. "I just can't believe you're still alive," He looked up at Mathias. "You promised you'd write. You promised."

"You would have seen me in the casualty lists if I'd been killed." Mathias reminded him, taking refuge in the facts of their shared war experience.

Lukas crossed his arms. "Not if they didn't find your body. Not if they didn't find your nametags," He sighed. "Mr Kirkland, for example, went 'missing' on the first day of the Somme, according to the telegram. I understood that to mean they never found his body. Since it has been four years with neither him nor any part of him returning home, I believe that assumption was correct." His speech was stiff and nervous, his eyes firmly on the ground.

Mathias was horrified. Arthur was dead. Arthur, who, though not exactly a father figure, had always been so kind to him in the few short months they had known each other. "That's awful." he said weakly.

Lukas nodded grimly. "It is," he replied. "And I thought the same had happened to you. The truth of it is, by the time the war ended, I had already mourned you."

With that, Lukas turned away from Mathias with a decisive motion and slipped back into the decaying darkness of the house. Mathias stood and watched him go, his work forgotten and his thoughts confused by the fact that Lukas, his love for whom he had suppressed by imagining he had never cared for him, had once cried over his supposed death.


	6. Becoming the Darkness

**Author's Note: Hey everyone! Sorry about the wait (again). I've had a crazy few weeks, with getting my GCSE results and getting ready to start my new 6****th**** form and everything (I start tomorrow – help!) so it's been hard to get a good sustained go at finishing this chapter, but it's finished now! On a side note, I went to the WW1 exhibition at the Imperial War Museum the other day – it was absolutely brilliant and gave me a few ideas for the direction the story will take. If you live in or will be visiting London or the surrounding areas, I highly recommend it.**

…

The pub was full of smoke and male voices – rough voices, heavy with the local accent and coarse with lack of refinement. It was more crowded than usual, heaving with the influx of summer workers who had come to lend the strength of their bodies for a few months, and the occasional inflection that spoke of the Lake District or West Country could be heard jarring the rhythm of the village speech as voices rose in jest or argument. Mathias knew that, come autumn, there would be even more workers as the harvest began. He knew that, but he had never witnessed it. He had never spent an autumn at Lille Skarstind – by September 1914, he'd been in an army training camp, and by October he'd been in a trench.

He remembered that first night – the career soldiers, already jaded, looking on the recruits with pity; the shock of the cold mud and endless damp; the pure terror of hearing the first volley of shells. In time, they'd all learnt to distinguish them all by learning to recognise the noise each one made, but at the time all the ammunition had been one shrieking, uniform, terrifying mass. And yet, now that he thought about it, on that first night in the trenches he had been too numb to really feel anything. He had been numb, yes, but just below that numbness had been the scalding vulnerability of laying himself and his heart open to Lukas – Lukas, the one he'd spent six years trying to reduce to a memory and a mistake. But after today, he could fool himself no longer.

"Mathias!" Gilbert, laughing, waved a hand in front of his face, and Mathias found himself jerked out of his trance.

"What?" he asked, for once irritated to be pulled out of his memories, no matter how dark they were.

Gilbert, oblivious, nudged him and pointed to his untouched beer. "You finishing that?"

Mathias shook his head and pushed it towards him. "You have it." he replied, for once having no desire to get drunk. Though a necessary anaesthetic to blunt the knife of his thoughts, for him the taste of alcohol would forever be associated with nights in the trenches, nights spent drinking away the fear of the coming morning's attack. He still drank, because he hardly knew what else to do with his spare time, but ever since the Somme the liquid had slithered down his throat like a dead thing, cold and disgusting. It turned his stomach, but the alternative was to always be as he was now – horribly, excruciatingly self-aware. He clenched his fists under the table and forced himself to look up, to focus on the conversation. The day's encounter with Lukas hovered just below the level of his consciousness, demanding to be examined, but he shoved it away for the moment. There would be time enough – indeed, his whole life – for regrets.

Gilbert was talking to a few of the other labourers from Lille Skarstind, discussing some inane point of contention in the previous Saturday's football match. There was something strange in all of their mannerisms, something that Mathias had observed since his return from the war. They all seemed a little too involved in the conversation – they all talked a little too loudly and argued their corner a little too passionately and their laughter, when there was cause for laughter, went on just a second or so too long and had an edge of madness to it. It was as though, with the darkness of their stolen youth moving in all of their minds, they were determined to reassert their status as young men who did the things all young men did. But never would such things come quite naturally to them, and never would they be able to forget the inherent deceit that lay at the heart of this pretence, this artificial carelessness. It was a fabricated youth, to replicate what they had been denied, and they all knew it. It was a lie, and a lie that they all told themselves, their wives and their children, and it was a lie they told over and over again. For some it became the truth; for others it became intolerable.

Mathias found his mind drifting towards thoughts of Arthur. It had been a shock to find out about his death like that, and even more so because it was not officially a death at all but the dreaded 'missing in action'. Those three words were the cruellest, with their tiny spark of hope that convinced desperate mothers that their sons must still be alive somewhere, in a hospital or prison camp or with his name and location simply lost in the chaos of post-battle paperwork. Even now, two years later, there were those who believed that their sons would come stumbling out of a wood in France or Belgium, shell-shocked and dressed in rags, but alive. He remembered the Somme well – it was the battle where he had been injured, a horrendous uphill attack that had gone on for months. It was such an awful place to be lost, and he felt a profound sadness at the thought that he would never know precisely where Arthur had been buried.

He had never really known Arthur at all, he reflected. The impression he had got was that Arthur was rather like all butlers – mannered, discreet and very much preoccupied with maintaining the balance of the household. He had never been anything but kind to him, but Mathias knew nothing about his family or background. A butler tended to work in one house for his entire career, and as he reflected on this fact it occurred to him that Lukas and Emil must have been close to him – he would have worked there when they were children, and possibly before. Mathias remembered one evening in particular, when he had walked into the same room as he was. He had seen him running a distracted hand through his hair, and in among the ash-blond strands he had glimpsed the duller glint of grey beginning to show through. The sight had moved him, in a strange way – it had been a sign of Arthur's departing youth, and almost piercingly intimate. Mathias had had to look away from him and slip from the room before being noticed. It had been a reminder that butlers did not generally have private lives, and that Arthur would have to mark the passage of the years alone.

Mathias looked up, trying to read the hands of the clock in the dim light and through the thick layer of cigarette smoke. Nine o'clock. It was possible to circumvent the boarding house's eleven o'clock curfew if you stayed out all night and slipped back in time for breakfast, but tonight he had no desire to stay out and no chance of going home with anyone. He tapped Gilbert on the shoulder in an attempt to pull him out of his animated conversation.

"We should be off." he said, gesturing in the direction of the clock. It would stay light outside for a while yet, but they had ten miles to cover on their rather unreliable second-hand bicycles.

Gilbert half-turned towards him. "Sorry? Oh right, yes, in a minute," He placed a friendly hand on Mathias's shoulder and made to introduce him to the two men he'd been talking to. "Berwald, Tino – this is my friend Mathias. He's a stonemason, and he's working on the house too."

The pair nodded in acknowledgement and the younger of the two, a boyish-looking man with a round face and eyes of a surprising shade of a delicate purple, stuck his hand out to be shaken.

"Nice to meet you!" he said brightly as Mathias took it. "I'm Tino. Tino Väinämöinen in full, but don't worry too much about that. The name's Finnish," he added by way of explanation, having seen Mathias's face as he struggled to place the unfamiliar language. "But my father visited the north of England, fell in love with the mountains and my mother and decided to stay," He had a pleasantly light voice, if a little high, and smiled broadly at the man sitting next to him. "This is my friend Berwald," he continued. "Well, I say he's my friend – really, we just met today," Berwald blushed faintly, but Tino seemed not to notice and pressed on with his introduction. "He's a furniture restorer and I'm a gardener."

Berwald, seeming to realise that something was now required of him, proffered his own hand. He looked to be in his late twenties, with a severe set to his face and eyes that were carefully expressionless behind a pair of glasses that were functional rather than fashionable.

"Good evening." he mumbled, more shyly than Mathias had expected. But it was not that which surprised him. It was that Berwald spoke with an accent that was strong and dark and so desperately, achingly familiar.

"Where are you from?" Mathias found himself asking, captivated by the sound of his voice.

"Sweden," Berwald replied. "Heard there weren't enough workers over here and thought I'd come and do what I could."

Not quite right then, Mathias thought with plunging disappointment. Not the right side of that narrow channel of water. "Were you ever in Denmark?" he asked as the hope of a connection with his homeland disappeared.

"I saw it from the boat," Berwald said. "Just as I was leaving."

Mathias sighed. "My father was Danish," he explained, feeling like he'd made a fool of himself with his childish question. "You sound a little like him.

"And mine was Prussian!" Gilbert interjected, although he was careful to keep his voice down in a pub full of former soldiers. Mathias felt a spark of irritation. Gilbert had no idea how much the broken link with his homeland meant to him. He had a brother, after all – someone to speak his native language to. "Denmark, Sweden, Finland," Gilbert was saying, pointing to each of the group in turn. "Prussia," he added, pointing to himself. "What shall we call ourselves then?" he asked cheerfully. "The northerners? The foreigners? All we need now is a Norwegian and we'll have the whole set."

Mathias stood up abruptly, his memories suddenly forced to the front of his mind. "We really need to be getting home, Gil," he said with forced lightness. "We don't want to be locked out."

"Oh, it's alright!" Gilbert reassured him. "We've got time. And the landlady's daughter clearly fancies me, so even if we're late she'll come to our rescue."

"Nonetheless, it's better to be sure." Mathias replied through gritted teeth. He needed to be in his room, alone, so that he could finally conduct the lengthy post-mortem of his and Lukas's terrible reunion. There was too much noise here – too much laughter, that awful, manic laughter that masked the men's memories of a time when they feared they would never laugh again.

Gilbert shrugged as if Mathias was being unreasonable and stood up slowly. "I suppose this is goodbye for the evening then, my friends," he said to Berwald and Tino. "Pleasure meeting both of you. I expect I'll see you tomorrow."

"Come on, it's nine-fifteen!" Mathias urged him.

"Yes, mother." Gilbert replied. He and Tino both laughed, and Mathias felt something in him sliding further into the pit of death. If he lost his good humour, his defining feature, then surely his very reason for living would follow. Then again, perhaps it already had. Perhaps he was alive simply because he had no reason to die.

…

Mathias was furious. More than that, he was afraid of himself. He could do anything when he was like this, absolutely anything. There was a darkness in him, but it was not a quiet darkness. It boiled and rippled, full of noise and flashes of memory, full of the desperate fear and blinding anger of war, and it refused to lie quiet. He could feel it twisting in him now, in his mind, pressing up behind his eyes. It lay trapped behind his clenched teeth, trying to push itself out in the form of a scream, a sob – anything at all. He pressed a hand over his mouth, not wanting the darkness to win, not wanting to let it out. For as long as it lay trapped inside him, he was normal. It was only if he released it that he would become like those men tucked away in convalescent homes, those glorified asylums. He refused to be one of them – he would not become a trembling, weeping wreck, an empty husk in whose eyes stretched the terrible blankness of a field after battle.

He knew he was crying. He had ceased to be ashamed of it long ago, but there was still a public unwillingness to discuss the idea that these fighting men, these brave sons of Empire, could have returned home covered not in glory but in the indelible blood of men and boys their own age. The soldiers had always been taught to attack without mercy, to aim at an enemy and blast away, and it was for this reason that, when the darkness came to blot out everything else, a former soldier would so often aim the gun at his own head.

It was midnight, the candlewick guttering helplessly in its last few drops of wax. Mathias wanted so desperately to go to sleep, but he was terrified of what might await him there. He pressed his back against the metal frame of the bed, feeling the shock of the cold iron through his thin shirt, and willed himself to keep awake. It was one of those nights when he could not bear to close his eyes. The darkness was there, and it was patient, and it would reel him in if he let his guard down for a moment. Morning would come, if he waited long enough, and the new day would bring work, and casual chat with Gilbert, and Lukas.

Lukas – oh God, Lukas! How could their love, the thing for which he had held such high hopes, have gone so completely wrong? Love – he had never called it that before, and it felt strange to do so, because it brought an unwelcome sense of profundity to an encounter that he had never previously considered to have meaning. Lukas had felt something for him – Mathias couldn't be sure what, but there had been something. Lukas had cared about him and, when he thought he was dead, had mourned him. In light of his new knowledge, his decision not to write showed itself to be not an act of pride or self-preservation, but unutterably cruel. Without knowing it, he had been torturing Lukas with a silence that was worse than a telegram from the War Office, worse than a curt note breaking off relations, worse than anything at all. The horrible uncertainty, the awful limbo of being listed 'missing in action'. The blank notice of injury card loomed in his imagination, condemning him for having wasted it.

He thought, too late, about all the comfort a letter from Lukas might have brought him, how vital one would have been on his worst days. And yet the unwritten letters were nothing compared to his greater sins. How many men had he been with throughout the war? How many afterwards? This artificial love, this mechanised relief, was so much worse now when he realised that Lukas must have been waiting for him. Each individual entanglement became an affair, an act of unfaithfulness, an unforgivable betrayal of the trust he had not even known Lukas had had in him. Mathias forced his back harder against the bed frame, so that the metal dug into his spine. He was nobody. He was balancing on the surface of a misery so deep that if he fell into it, he would be lost forever. He buried his head in his hands and his struggling candle, its wick all burnt away, was subsumed into the darkness. No use trying to ward it off, really. The darkness was in him, and it was him. It was his nature, and it was inseparable from who he had been before.

…

The next day passed uneventfully. Mathias, having accidentally fallen asleep, had woken early and exhausted from a brief, violent dream that was best forgotten, and had largely been able to put the previous night's terrors to the back of his mind. As long as he kept his thoughts full of work, football and conversation, the darkness would be buried – at least until he was alone again. He had made an impressive amount of progress on the first statue, then had taken a break for lunch with Gilbert, Berwald and Tino, listening with shock to Tino's stories of being a 'legendary' sniper during the war. He would be twenty in December – officially too young to have fought – but he had enlisted in 1916 with a forged birth certificate and quickly built up a reputation. He was proud of the medals and attention he had got for himself, and it had been a struggle for Mathias to remain focused on what was in front of him and stop himself from retreating into the black pit of his own four years of undistinguished service. It was not Tino who had celebrated shooting twelve men in a single day, Mathias reminded himself, just as it had not been him throwing a grenade into the face of an oncoming enemy. They had been soldiers then, and now they were ordinary men. They had not murdered those enemies, merely followed an order to kill, which was most emphatically not the same thing. Or so Mathias so desperately wished he could believe.

By six o'clock, when the workers were packing up their tools and drifting off in the direction of their lodgings or the pub, Lukas had still not made an appearance. This irritated some of the men, including Gilbert, who felt that it was an act of snobbery. It worried Mathias, who knew that it was because Lukas was avoiding him, or perhaps the memories and emotions that Mathias triggered in him. Sighing, Mathias began to gather his things together. It was a testimony to the illogicality of love, he supposed, that after all this time he could still desire Lukas – that his face could still heat up at the thought of touching him, kissing him, pledging himself completely to him.

He stopped, a chisel still absently clutched in one hand, and stood conflicted for a moment. Eventually, he sighed and bent down, unpacking his bag again. He would stay here after everyone else, he decided, then slip into the house and try to get Lukas to listen to him long enough to understand. What Lukas needed to understand, he did not know, and nor did he know how he would explain it, but he knew how important it was to talk to him.

Having decided on this course of action, he began tapping away at the statue once more, putting on a show of being hard at work and waiting impatiently for all others to leave. Gilbert came up to him and asked why he was staying; he replied that he wanted to get 'just this last bit' finished and told Gilbert to make sure no one took his bicycle. His hands were slick with nervous sweat, and he could barely keep hold of his tools. The terrible reunion with Lukas ran through his mind again and again, and he analysed every word and movement like a playwright trying to communicate a world of meaning to his audience through a single throwaway gesture. 'I had already mourned you', Lukas had said. What did that mean? That, once the war was over, he had had shed no more tears for him? That he no longer felt anything for him at all?

…

The entrance hall gave the impression of work abruptly stopped. One damp-spotted wall had had half of a fresh coat of plaster applied and a largely ornamental chaise longue had been dragged out into the centre and placed on a dustsheet so that its frame could be varnished – Mathias found himself wondering if this was Berwald's handiwork. But there was a depressing amount left to do. The chandelier was speckled with tarnish, its glass pendants almost opaque with dust. The whitewashed ceiling was the lumpy texture of curdled milk and grey with neglect. He had never seen Lille Skarstind in its glory days, but now it was in a truly dreadful state. If Lukas was intending to sell it, he'd be lucky if he got enough to pay all the workers, Mathias thought.

It broke his heart to see the house like this. He knew the place too well to be unmoved by its decline. There, off to the sides, were the two long corridors that linked all the rooms on the ground floor. There, untouched for years, was the side table where invitations and calling-cards would be placed until the lady of the house was ready to look through them. And there, winding away above him, was the main staircase. And Lukas had stood just – there. And from there he had spoken to him. And then he had run down to him, nervous, unable to look him in the eye, and what had followed had been the worst mistake of both their lives. If they had just waited, Mathias thought, they could have kept up a correspondence. Their relationship would have developed properly, with the passing of time. They could have come home and visited each other on leave, and there would have been no question in his mind about whether to tell him about his wound. They could have been one of those couples – and Mathias knew they existed – who, through careful secrecy and highly selective social mixing, were able to stay together for years at a time despite the very nature of their relationship being illegal.

He put a foot on the first step, and it creaked under him. He felt a weakness in it, and resolved to tread carefully. Only twice in his life had he climbed these stairs – once up, and once down. Only once – today – had he entered through the front door, and only once had he left through it. He breathed in the heavy dampness of the house. It was unhealthy, this thick air that settled in the lungs. It reminded him, as all things did, of the war – of the wet heat of chlorine searing the soldiers' airways, and how lucky he had been to escape that particular torment.

"Lukas!" he called up the stairs, his voice echoing hollowly in the silence like someone was mocking his desperation.

Footsteps, quick and moving away from him. A door slamming.

"Lukas!" he called again. "Why won't you talk to me?"

There was no answer, and his ears rang and buzzed with the silence, a sound like the shriek of shells. Mathias felt a twist of nerves. Who was in the wrong here? Was it him, for letting Lukas believe he was dead, or Lukas, for refusing to listen to him now?

He climbed the stairs and turned down a hallway, once grandiloquently termed the 'long gallery'. The paintings on the walls had mostly been sold off, but the occasional Bondevik ancestor had been spared, glaring down at Mathias as he followed the all-too-familiar route to the room from which he had once heard music, the room with the bed with the red curtains. He passed by doors that he knew would be locked and swollen in their frames, and others that he knew would lead to empty rooms. He had wanted to go to the auction with Arthur, but had firmly been told to stay behind. It had hurt Arthur, he knew, to see the house to which he had devoted his professional life – his whole life, really – be sold off piece by piece.

He came to the door. A memory rose in him, a memory of a night when he had drunk a little too much and stood here and listened to Lukas's faint music and longed, more than anything else, to tell him how he felt. It was disconcerting, an extreme sort of déjà vu, and as he stood there he felt all the ideas and versions of Lukas flooding his mind at once. There was the shy schoolboy he had been when they met, watching him as he unpacked his suitcase. There was the idolised object of Mathias's lust he had been all that blistering summer, the lambent beauty who had appeared in his dreams and smiled at him so tantalisingly on the night of the party. There was the imagined one, the one Mathias had convinced himself to hate all those long years. And then there was the real Lukas, the one who had made all Mathias's memories and ideas irrelevant, the one who even now was hiding from him because Mathias had wounded him. Because he had betrayed him. Because they had been two eighteen-year-old boys with no understanding of the workings of the heart.

Mathias took a deep breath, pulled himself up to his full height and knocked.

"Lukas?" he said pleadingly. "Lukas, will you let me in?"

He heard the sound of a book snapping shut, then Lukas moving restlessly. "No." came the eventual reply, but the voice was weak and irresolute.

Mathias sighed. "You don't have to let me in. Will you just open the door?" He knocked again. "Please. I just want to talk to you."

There was more movement, then Mathias heard the clicking of Lukas's shoes as he walked to the door and the squeaking of the hinges as he opened it.

"Is there a problem with the work?" Lukas asked, his voice dull and flat. The door was only open a crack, but through it Mathias could glimpse what looked like Lukas's whole life. A tin bath stood in front of the fireplace, and washed shirts had been draped over the fireguard to dry. Books were piled high on the floor, and there were three photograph frames arranged on the bedside table, although Mathias couldn't quite make out who was in the pictures. Lukas kept his hand on the doorknob, as though ready to slam it shut at any moment.

"You know that's not it." Mathias said, exasperated.

Lukas shrugged, putting on a show of not understanding. "Then I don't know what it has to do with me." he replied, outwardly calm but unable to look Mathias in the eye.

Mathias wanted to seize his face, to force it upwards and make him look at him. He was tired of this evasiveness.

"I wanted to tell you I'm sorry," he managed to say at last, shoving his violent thoughts back into the boiling darkness. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "For not writing."

Lukas closed his eyes for a moment, sighing. "If you so clearly didn't want anything to do with me," he began softly. "Then why did you come here again? To laugh at me?" He made a sweeping gesture that encompassed his shabby room. "Does it make you happy, the fact that this is all I've got left?"

Mathias shook his head, horrified. Had his silence really been so cruel that Lukas would assume the worst of him like that? "I wanted to see you again," he admitted. "I just wasn't sure if you wanted to see me."

Lukas tightened his grip on the doorknob, his other hand clinging to the edge of the door. "The war ended nearly two years ago," he replied. "Why have you only come now?"

Mathias ran through a hundred possible answers in his head, then finally decided on the truth. "I didn't think you were interested in… pursuing a relationship." he said eventually.

Lukas looked to be on the verge of tears. "I'm not anymore, Mathias," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "I've had so much else to think about since you left."

It was then that something occurred to Mathias, something so obvious he couldn't believe he hadn't seen it before: Lukas was alone in the house. "Where's your mother?" he asked. "Where's Emil?"

"My mother is dead," said Lukas flatly. "She was ill to begin with, and the damp didn't do her any good. I tried to make her go somewhere else, but she thought it was her duty to stay."

"And Emil?"

A look of unguarded pain flashed across Lukas's face, and his eyes darkened with despair. "He doesn't live here anymore." he said.

"He's not…"

"No, he's not dead," Lukas said, his voice suddenly angry. "He just lives somewhere else now. Somewhere better," He bit down on his lip. "I have to stay here, in case he wants to come home. I have a duty to him," He sighed. "My mother went to see him once, before she got ill, and then she couldn't bear to go again."

"What's wrong with him?" Mathias asked.

"Nothing to do with you," Lukas replied sharply. "And I think you should go now." The transformation in him was startling – he had gone from confessional to secretive in just a few seconds.

Mathias was startled. "I only…"

"This house may not be as grand as it once was," Lukas said. "But it's still my property. You're on my property, and I'm ordering you off it."

"We're all soldiers here!" Mathias protested. "You can tell me what happened. I'll understand."

The door slammed shut.


	7. Men whose Minds the Dead Have Ravished

**Author's Note: Hi guys! I know it's been a while, but I've been really busy with starting my A-Levels at a new sixth form (I'm taking French, Spanish, English Literature and Religious Studies, if you care), so I haven't really been able to write much. This is also a very sensitive chapter, so I wanted to do my research beforehand and make sure everything was presented in the right way. For a far better description of the soldiers' suffering than I could ever create, I recommend that you read Wilfred Owen's poem 'Mental Cases' (which the chapter title is quoted from) and Siegfried Sassoon's 'Survivors' – I could write every day for a hundred years and never create a simile as perfect as Owen's 'Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh'.**

…

August 1920

A fly whirred feebly against the window of the train, climbing the pane a few inches, then dropping down again before reaching the open top section. Someone laughed, distantly, on the platform; the guard unhurriedly listed off the stops. Lukas pulled his watch out of his pocket and consulted it, his customary frown deepening for a moment. Mathias looked over at him, then looked away just as quickly as Lukas raised his eyes from his watch and caught him doing so. The train seemed unwilling to pull away from the station on such a languidly hot day, and when it eventually began to move, it was with a sullen, reluctant jolt that made all the passengers tense in their seats. The women fanned themselves with rolled-up magazines, and all the men in the carriage surreptitiously loosened their collars. Mathias pulled the knot of his tie down an inch or two so that it no longer rested uncomfortably against his throat, feeling irritated by the stinging itch of his damp shirt sticking to his back.

Sighing at the delay, Lukas snapped his watch shut and put it back into his pocket. His hand went to his hair, then, catching himself in this nervous act, he crossed his arms and looked distractedly out of the window as the scorched summer fields slipped by, the stooped and scattered figures of the labourers just visible as the train picked up speed. The sky was majestically, emptily blue, the horizon a perfect divide between it and the flat landscape. Mathias risked another glance at Lukas, then turned to face the window. The brightness of the sky made his eyes sting and water. Piercing blue. He had never really understood that phrase before.

Lukas opened the book he had brought with him and, after a few minutes, Mathias judged it safe to abandon the view from the window. It was the first time he had really got a good look at Lukas since their reunion, and he had changed since that boyhood summer of 1914. There was a small tear in one of the sleeves of his jacket, and it had been repaired with wide, erratic stitches that reminded Mathias of a child's first attempt at writing. It was the work of someone who had never had to sew before, and Mathias was certain that Lukas had done it himself. He was thinner than before, too – no longer slender, but thin. Hunger, maybe – not starvation, but careful rationing. Or maybe it was stress, for Mathias could see the first premature lines of worry beginning to appear, subtly as yet, around the eyes which seemed to be darkening with despair. There was no glint in them; the moon and stars were extinguished, and the night sky lay dull and flat in its own darkness.

Since that evening when Lukas had slammed the door in his face, their encounters had been sporadic and impersonal. He had seen him at the end of June and July, when he had come to give the workers their pay. There had been less than expected, and those who could afford to move on had done so. When it had come to his turn, Mathias had tried to catch his eye, but Lukas had simply handed him the envelope with his name on it, and said nothing. Occasionally, Lukas would inspect the work, but he always avoided the statues, and his interactions with the other workers were peremptory. "Don't care much for him upstairs," Gilbert had said one day. "Thinks he's too bloody good for us, doesn't he? Well, I'd like to tell him this: it's not my roof that's falling in." Mathias had nodded in feigned agreement, and taken another drag of his cigarette. He had been so profoundly tired – far too tired to even begin to explain the pain that Lukas's cold demeanour masked, and far too guilty to admit who it was that had made him feel like that.

And that was why it had been such a shock when Lukas had come to him, urgent and unbidden, one evening when he was preparing to leave.

"Mathias," he had said, as nervous as that night six years before. "Mathias, I must ask you something."

Mathias had said nothing, but inclined his head for Lukas to go on.

"I know you remember Emil. You met him when you were working here."

Mathias's overarching impression had been one of a rather arrogant teenage boy who had made him feel ignorant over that little business with the _Iliad_, but he nodded nonetheless.

"I go and see him sometimes," Lukas had continued. "I'm the only person from his old life. My mother and Mr Kirkland are dead, as are a good few of his friends. I know he'll remember you if he sees you, and maybe…" Here he had paused, looking down at the ground like a scolded child. "… Maybe you can talk to him. About the fighting. It might help him, being with someone who understands."

Mathias had begun to suspect where Emil might have ended up, and a creeping dread had come over him. He would go to most places without a second thought, but not there – never, ever there. But then an image flashed into his mind, of Emil sitting and laughing, innocent, with that boy on the night of the party. The war had broken Mathias, and he was someone already inured to pain and disappointment. What it would have done to Emil – the boy, the cherished youngest child – was unthinkable. To refuse to see him would be another act of unbearable cruelty to Lukas, and perhaps the worst one of all.

"I'll come." he'd said at last, and seen a solitary spark of hope light in Lukas's eyes, just for a moment.

"Thank you," Lukas had replied, sincerely. "I do talk to him, you know, but there are certain things… Thank you."

…

Emil's new home was quite a walk away from the station, a strenuous four miles across fields, through rusty-hinged gates and over stiles. There was a bus that would get them much nearer and in a fraction of the time, but Lukas had been unwilling to take it and Mathias, seeing how carefully he had counted out the coins for their third-class train tickets, had said nothing.

There was no shelter from the heat out here in the open fields, and Mathias could feel the hot sting of sunburn beginning to prick at his neck as he followed Lukas, who was leading the way a few yards ahead of him. The landscape reminded him of the endless marches through the French countryside and, alone as he was, he soon found himself slipping into one of his introspective moods.

The stillness of the day, he felt, in some way resembled his own life. Its lack of movement was cloying and lay all around him – he was excruciatingly aware of it, but he could do nothing about it. There was nothing that could provide the metaphorical breath of wind to set things in motion again. Worse, he knew that the men he had fought alongside were moving on without him. Several had married and started families, and had escaped their demons that way. A few had found work of a more fulfilling sort than soldiering, instead starting their own businesses or following some previously ignored vocation. Others sought their release in a different way, and at least one of Mathias's comrades had silenced the voices in his head by putting a gun to it.

And yet, he himself had done nothing. It was impossible for him to do anything when he lived so deeply buried in his memories. He had come to distrust happiness – for him, every smile was a mask, and every reconstructed life a work of artifice. It was impossible for him to believe that anyone had really managed to put the war behind them. And if they had, what was wrong with him? If they had, why couldn't he? He hated his life, and the way he was doing nothing with it. He worked, yes, but not towards anything in particular. He had friends, but in time they too would move on and leave him. Gilbert was always teasing the girls – soon something more would come of it, and Mathias would be left alone, unmarriageable, thrown into the same category as the men who needed only shut their eyes for the darkness and the fury to come rushing out at them. He felt that way himself, sometimes.

Ahead of him, Lukas paused to shift his satchel a little higher on his shoulder. Mathias watched him with a helpless sort of longing. He had come to realise that he had no chance with him now, not after all that had happened. Lukas was, to put it simply, totally uninterested in forming any sort of relationship. They had had their chance, and quite spectacularly missed it. And yet Lukas was the only one who could spark any sort of emotion in him, even if it was painful. Gilbert and all the rest were good fun, but the feeling they gave him was a sort of soft, vaguely contented warmth – nothing as profound as the searing knife of frustrated attraction that the merest glimpse of Lukas could send through him. It was painful, but the pain was good, because it reminded him that he could still feel things and, most of the time, it was a reminder he sorely needed.

He had not slept with anyone since his reunion with Lukas, and was no longer interested in doing so. He had cheapened the idea of it – defiled the very act of love itself until it was nothing more to him than a sequence of coldly itemised actions. He was too jaded for the thrill of experimentation and too experienced for nerves or excitement. To be indifferent to the fusing of souls – what a terrible, terrible way to live! Even if he went with Lukas again, he thought, what made him think that it would be any different from what he had had with everyone else? Every last drop of feeling in him had been squeezed out long ago, and he had no love left to give. It was better this way, he thought. And safer, too. The police had a habit of infiltrating known 'queer spots', and he knew the danger of propositioning the wrong person. Even asking for it was enough – the intention without the act could still land you in prison for a couple of years.

Above him, the heat continued to press against his exposed neck, and the dry air was full of dust from the parched crops. All around him, Mathias heard the shrilling of insects, and the sound rose in his mind, and became one with the monumental dissonance of his own thoughts.

…

The house stood in a large and pleasant garden, with an immaculate lawn that, though bisected by a gravel driveway, swept all the way down to the gates. Along the edges, and at intervals in the grass itself, were small trees, some of which appeared to be gestating fruit for the autumn. The house itself was comfortably large, painted white with black window frames and a trellis up which a few tendrils of ivy were reluctantly beginning to climb. The French doors had been thrown open, and through them trickled the sound of an anodyne waltz being played on some distant gramophone.

Spread over the lawn were several benches and deckchairs, in which men sat and chatted, or read, or simply stared ahead of them. None of them could have been older than thirty, and they were all dressed in loose-fitting off-the-peg suits in a shade of light blue that made them look like office workers on a trip to the seaside. They all looked perfectly pleasant, the sort of people you'd enjoy a drink with and then never see again, and Mathias was terrified of them.

He was terrified of them because there was no difference between him and them. They were there because their minds, like his, could not hold all the terror of war all at once, but, unlike him it had come spilling out in some act of violence, or a nervous breakdown, or a desperate attempt to run away from battle. Mathias felt something cold twist in his stomach. It was wrong for him to be here as a visitor. He felt sure that any moment now he would be identified as an impostor, and that a nurse would appear at his elbow to lead him, gently but firmly, to a quiet room set aside for madmen like him. Really, he realised with a sense of plunging horror, the only thing that separated him from the men here was that they had made the mistake of releasing the scream that he still held inside him, though it came perilously close to escaping at times. And if these men had gone mad because of the guilt of killing another human being, then what did Mathias's continuing appearance of sanity say about him? Surely these men were better than him, in some strange way, because killing had caused them even more pain than it had caused him.

Mathias felt half-mad himself as he and Lukas approached the doors. The closer he came to the patients, the more he began to notice things that were not quite right with them. Some had walking sticks or crutches propped up beside them, others appeared to be paralysed and still others had faces a little twisted or puckered at the edges – reconstructed faces, sewn up to cover those awful gaping wounds that so haunted Mathias at night. He caught snatches of some the men's conversations, and noticed that a few of them stammered terribly, while others kept up a series of small, compulsive movements – tapping on the arm of the bench, perhaps, or plucking at their clothes. It was such small signs as these that gave away the great, boiling abyss of madness inside them. All the doctors' optimistic pronouncements aside, these men would never be normal again.

And neither will I, Mathias thought as Lukas led him into the house of madness. Neither will I.

…

Emil's room was situated at the back of the house, on the first floor and reached by the back stairs. The corridor was painted in a calmly neutral shade of cream, a few still lifes hanging on the walls – no pictures with any hint of militarism, and no landscapes whose wide, empty fields could perhaps, to a painfully active imagination, suggest the battlefields of Belgium and France.

"He'll be in here," Lukas whispered, pausing at the door. "He doesn't go outside all that much. It irritates his chest," He took a deep breath and shifted slightly from foot to foot. Eventually, he raised a hesitant fist to the door and knocked quietly. "Emil," he said softly. "It's me again. I've brought someone you might remember."

At first, Mathias was surprised by the gentleness in his tone, the affection so far removed from his usual expressionlessness, but then he remembered that Lukas had spoken to him like that once – only once, but it had been enough to haunt him ever since that night. He had spoken to him like that only once in his life, but in all his dreams throughout that boyhood summer, he had heard that soft voice whisper words of love to him, heard it make the extravagant promises that he had longed to make himself.

There was a silence just long enough for them to begin to feel anxious, then a voice somewhat deeper than Mathias remembered called out:

"Come in. It's not locked."

Lukas cast an unreadable look at Mathias, as if he wanted him to save him from his duty, then began to turn the handle. "Just talk to him as if you don't notice anything." he told him. He opened the door and together he and Mathias entered the room.

The room was rather more comfortable than what one would find in a hospital. The furnishings were of dark wood, glossy in the sunlight, and the bed was large and appeared to be soft. There were two wooden chairs and a matching table which was piled high with books and pieces of paper. From the wardrobe in the corner, the trapped sleeve of a shirt protruded, and the slow ticking of the clock marked off the minutes of their visit. With a little suspension of belief, the room could have been in a modest hotel, or a middle-class townhouse. But it was not, and they were not, and neither was Emil.

The boy, who Mathias saw was now a man, stood up as they entered. Mathias had been expecting the two brothers to embrace, but instead they stood awkwardly apart, separated by the unequal burden of their experiences.

"How have you been?" Lukas asked, somewhat stiffly, the brightness in his voice as brittle as blown glass.

"No better, no worse." Emil replied. He paused to draw a handkerchief out of his pocket and coughed into it – a deep, violent cough. Chlorine, Mathias realised. The stuff was a poison, and you never quite got over the effects.

"Have you been helping in the library? I told your doctor it might do you some good." Lukas encouraged him.

Emil shrugged. "When I feel like it," he replied with a hint of his old truculence. "And who's this you've brought with you?"

Lukas gestured towards Mathias, who suddenly felt terribly vulnerable. "You remember, Mathias, don't you? He worked at Lille Skarstind back when you were sixteen – that summer when we had the party, remember?"

Emil turned towards him, and it took all of Mathias's conscious will to prevent himself gasping in shock. From cheekbone to jaw, the left side of Emil's face seemed almost to be made from some different sort of material – it was skin, yes, but it had been sewn on, grafted, put there to cover some awful wound. The corner of his mouth was twisted up, pulled into the shape of a permanent half-smile. And yet the worst thing about his face was the eyes of pale tyrian purple that, though outwardly undamaged, were full of the bleak stillness that Mathias so feared. Emil had been broken, and badly. His disfigurement was noticeable, though not hideous, but it was those eyes that held the true horror.

Mathias forced himself to speak. "Hello, Emil," he said, the words sliding reluctantly past his lips. "I remember you. You laughed at me because I didn't know Latin, that day under the tree."

Emil fixed him with a stare. "Did you fight?" he asked bluntly, ignoring Mathias's recollection.

"Yes," Mathias replied, a little startled by the question. "I enlisted the week after the war broke out. I don't suppose you remember me going off to the training camp?" There was no response. "I was wounded at the Somme, but I fought the whole four years."

"Then you're a better man than him." Emil replied, in a voice overflowing with bitterness, his words slightly distorted by the new shape of his mouth. With a dismissive toss of his head, he indicated 'him' to be Lukas.

There was an abrupt silence, and in his peripheral vision, Mathias saw Lukas's hands clench into startled fists, the redness of shame or fury flooding into his cheeks like the jet of a gas flame suddenly turned up. Embarrassed, Mathias said nothing, one hand self-consciously fiddling with the knot of his tie. Of course Lukas had fought. Everyone had been conscripted. There had been no way out unless you were a doctor or policeman or had some sort of illness.

With apparent difficulty, Lukas cleared his throat. "Would you leave us for a moment?" he asked Mathias, in a voice tight with suppressed emotion.

And Mathias, eager to be out of the firing line, nodded and slipped away.

He lingered outside the door for a moment then, finding it impossible to make out the conversation, drifted downstairs through another pastel-coloured corridor adorned with pictures of fruits and flowers that, in the darkness of old oil paint, looked bruised and decaying. There was the faint smell of something cooking – something reassuringly English, like boiled beef – and the sound of two men talking, one professional, one plaintive. It was all rather different from his visions of a madhouse – there were no screams, no chains, no straitjackets – but he knew that the madness here was of a far more insidious type. And he was so close to it himself. Emil's ravaged face loomed in his mind, stamped with the cold expression he had worn when denouncing his brother. Where had he been wounded like that? And what had it felt like when the shell had blown up in his face?

As he approached the garden, a young man dressed in the uniform of the patients poked his head around a door.

"Hello there," he said with childish enthusiasm. "Are you visiting?"

Mathias nodded. "I'm here with a friend," he replied, not knowing if it was true or not. "He's just talking to his brother at the moment."

"We're just about to sit down to lunch," said the man. "You're more than welcome to come and join us."

Something in the man's guilelessness broke Mathias's heart. He knew that he had reverted to this childlike state as his mind's way of escaping the horrors of his memories, and he wanted more than anything else to accept the invitation. But something in him rebelled against the idea, perhaps the idea that, just as in the kingdom of fairies, if he ate the food of this place he would be trapped in it.

"No, thank you," he replied, forcing a smile. "I ate a little while ago. Couldn't fit another bite!"

The man grinned – too wide, too uninhibited – and shrugged. "Very well then. Have a pleasant evening."

"You too." Mathias murmured, and went out into the garden – the outside world, the land of the living – to be alone with the thoughts that so terrified him.

…

The sun was setting as the train began its slow journey through the villages, and he and Lukas were alone in their carriage. They had said very little to each other since the scene in Emil's room, and Lukas seemed badly shaken.

"How was Emil?" Mathias asked, once he could bear the silence no longer. He knew he was unlikely to get an answer, but decided it was worth a try anyway.

"Not as bad as some," Lukas muttered in response, making no reference to the conversation they had had after Mathias's departure. "Argumentative, as you saw. They say that's better than just giving up on life the way some of them have."

The way I have, Mathias added silently. The day had unnerved him. Deep in his mind, he felt the darkness beginning to rise again, and he knew he would get no sleep tonight. "How long has he been living there?" he asked.

"A year or so," Lukas replied. "He was in a hospital before that. They gave him electric shocks all the time."

"Why don't you bring him home? It might be the best thing for him." Mathias advised.

Lukas shook his head and moved back in his seat, burying himself deeper in the evening shadows. "I don't want him being looked at." he said sullenly.

"Is it that?" Mathias persisted. "Or is it more that you don't want to have to look at him?"

Lukas folded his arms. His face was obscured, but Mathias heard the crack in his voice. "If you must know, it's because he doesn't want to see me," He sighed. "You can be so cruel sometimes. Both of you can. And what's more, neither of you really understands what you're saying at all."


End file.
